<p>I’m a business economics major and I know how hard it is to get into biz econ @ UCLA. will taking honors calculus give me an advantage over other applicants? is it worth the risk of possibly getting a lower grade due to the increased load of the honors classes?</p>
<p>Edit: I am doing TAP, btw, and considering taking Honors Calc to fulfill the Tap req…</p>
<p>If you took the SATs what was your SAT math score?</p>
<p>I didn’t take the SATs. Let’s just say I was never the top student in any of my high school math classes :-/</p>
<p>YES, DO IT. I highly recommend doing that. Just stay on top of your workload.</p>
<p>It is better to do that since you can kill two birds with one stone with the TAP and pre-reqs.</p>
<p>I realize that the Calculus courses taken by Business Economics majors are not as rigorous as the ones taken by Math, Physical Science and Engineering majors but it is still Calculus, and an honors course as well, so it will be no pushover. You implied that you have not taken any Math courses since high school and struggled with them. Have you taken a Pre-calculus course? Without a SAT Math score it is really hard to know what kind of an aptitude you have for Math and there seems to be some question as to how well prepared you are for honors Calculus. Do you know what textbook the class uses? That is important information in trying to determine how difficult this course will be.</p>
<p>@Lemaitre1, the first 2 calc courses required for UCLA Business Economics are the same as those required for Math, Physical Science and Engineering majors.</p>
<p>^Exactly^…its not business calculus he must take, its the real deal calc. I say take it. You better be good at math if you are shooting for any Economics degree, especially Biz Econ at UCLA. If you suck at math, change ur major.</p>
<p>I think my college uses Thomas’s Calculus. I have not taken preCalc yet, I will in the fall. I am taking a winter Trig session right now. Trig seems simple enough. I don’t know what to expect in PreCalc though.</p>
<p>Precalc is like an extension of Algebra 2. Almost a “review.” You really shouldn’t find anything complicated. Some of the major topics include:
[ul]
[<em>] Logarithms and Exponential Functions
[</em>] Functions and their graphs (translations)
[li] Quad Functions (synthetic division, asymptotes, zeros, etc)[/li][/ul]
I’m sure a miss a few but those are pretty much your major topics. For Calculus I would review trig. Very important. Also make sure you know Trig identities, vectors, conics, and parametric equations. I think this is more important the topics listed above.</p>
<p>One of the first things you will learn in Pre-calculus, the difference quotient (f(x+h)-f(x)/h), will be pretty much the fundamental for calculus. It will lead you into derivatives which is all calculus 1a is about.</p>
<p>^ agreed. probably one of the most important things I got from pre-cal going into cal is the formula for finding a derivative using limits. It’ll set you up for the harder stuff. The rest is kinda like a review of trig and intmediate algebra.</p>
<p>Thomas’ Calculus is an easy book so don’t be stressed. You can learn a lot in honor Calculus. I took the combined cal 1 and cal 2 honor class and I learned a lot from this class. There were also some buz guys taking this course and they also said that it was good for their major.</p>
<p>Thomas’ Calculus is now in its 12 edition and has been around since the 1960s. George Thomas, a former professor at MIT who originally wrote the book, is deceased so you will be using a book actually written by new authors who have retained the Thomas name because it was at one time one of the most widely used texts for teaching engineering students Calculus. Although I am an MD practicing medicine my undergraduate major was Astronomy so I am somewhat familiar with earlier editions of this text which I thought were pretty good but I do not recall any applications discussed or problems given that were related to Economics.</p>
<p>A recent Calculus book I am familiar with because my elder son, a Geology major who just finished Calculus 2 and will soon start Calculus 3 is using it, is “Calculus, Early Transcendentals” 6th edition by James Stewart. The Stewart text seems to be the one most widely used by the UCs and CSUs for their Calculus courses for Math, Physical Sciences and Engineering majors and many of the problems at the end of each section are extremely challenging. That is probably why UC Berkeley and Cal Poly SLO are among the California public universities that use this text. The Thomas text might actually be more appropriate for students who did not have honors pre-calculus and AP Calculus in high school.</p>
<p>Yes! we used Early Transcendentals by James Stewart (5th edition) for Calc 1, Calc 2 and Multivariable, and I swear by it. It is one of the finest math books ever! </p>
<p>I wish that author had written a book for Differential Eqns./Linear Algebra as well. We used one of the WORST and MOST HORRENDOUS books out there for our DE/LA course: “Elementary Differential Equations with Linear Algebra by Albert L. Rabenstein - 4th edition”. I went so far as to post a review on Amazon that this book should be burned and banned from publication. </p>
<p>An even nicer math text book (possibly the best I have come accross) is the one we will use for my Discrete Math course (Discrete Mathematics and Its Applications by Kenneth H. Rosen - 6th ed)</p>