Is calculus 1-3 as hard as people say?

College Majors Engineering Majors
21

I went back to college at the age of 30. Hadn’t done any math in over 10 years and even back in HS i was average in math. Didn’t take ANY AP.

1st semester i took pre calc. got like 97%. Studied everyday 3-4 hrs a day not only the concepts of pre calc, but all the algebra and trig i had forgotten. Went to Khan academy to watch videos and found out graphing things really helped me out. I’m very visual. So whenever possible i’d graph whatever function i was working on. Teacher was awesome. Enthusiastic and really knew his stuff.

2nd Semester I took Calc 1. Boy was i glad i put in all the work back in precalc. I continued to study 2-3 hrs a day and did extra work like proofs that weren’t required. Lim as x approaches zero of sin x/x blew my mind. Continued to graph everything which came REALLY handy when understanding integrals and derivatives. I could picture the graphs in my head and avoided MANY pitfalls when deriving or integrating functions. Teacher was god awful. Went on tangents ,made lots of mistakes while explaining and had to back track. Couldn’t answer questions. So it was mostly me and the book + Khan academy. Still managed to get 98%

I’m now in Calc 2. And stuff from precalc keeps popping up. Just went over partial decomposition to integrate rational functions, we came back to the trig identities to bring down the power of trig functions and enable us to integrate them and continue to use trig substitution. My teacher is russian and has a super thick accent and she’s really really intelligent.

Calc 2 seems less daunting than calc 1. Maybe all the hard work early paid off. precalc wasnt hard but required a lot of work. I did get stuck in Calc 1 during fundamental theorem of calculus. It was kinda abstract. Solids of revolution gave everyone in my class a hard time, but since i was in the habit of graphing stuff, it was the easiest section in Calc 1 for me.

Hope this info helps :smiley:

22

My D took AP Calc BC in high school and got credits for Calc 1 & 2 from that. I guess that means Calc 1 and 2 should not be too difficult.

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bill - Maybe yes, maybe no. Some kids do well on AP calc exams but opt to retake calc at college level, and still find it challenging.

24

I’m taking calc BC and I averaged a 97 with studying in the AB topics, and a 90 in the BC stuff without studying(Senioritis is very strong this time of the year), so it’s not too difficult. What I used to do, was take the notes, do all of the homework, and after I finish each question, I’d check an answer key site like slader, and see if I got it right. If I didn’t, I marked it. After doing all the problems, I go back and see the marked questions, write little notes as to why I got it wrong, and write a little summary as to what mistakes I made, and little tips I should remember for the next time I do similar problems. It’s really about practice and hard work, what I used to say was “After doing a problem 100 times, I ran out of ways to get it wrong”.