I’m in precalc right now and I’ve heard stories about AP calculus being easier! Is that true?
No, but you may have a different experience.
It’s very subjective (eg it really depends on what makes sense to you). For me, precal was harder conceptually than calculus, but calculus definitely required more work.
I know some people who blazed through precal and failed calculus and others who love calculus but really struggled with precal.
It’s all a matter of taste (and teachers/classes, of course)
Hopefully that helps?
Honestly AP Calculus is definitely harder than precalculus… Precalculus is lots of trigonometry and basic beginnings of graphing Calculus graphs. But when you get to AP calculus, you learn a WHOLE new language of math and that’s what makes it more difficult and complicated. Nothing a person can’t handle, though.
I honestly fround AP Calculus AB easier than Precalculus
“Precalc” is an incredibly vague subject title. No two schools define it exactly alike. And very few schools agree exactly what should be included in the course that comes before it-- “Algebra II & Trig” in my school, but just “Algebra II” or “Trig” in many others.
This is kind of the ultimate case of “your mileage may vary.”
I don;t mean to be rude, but there is a reason there a prefix “pre” placed in front of “calculus” in the word “pre-calculus.”
And to answer your question, AP Calculus is much harder than pre-calculus. The AP Calculus AB exam is actually harder than the IB Calculus course because it covers a broader range of topics in that course.
Lower-level classes can be harder than higher-level classes.
In this case, I think most people would say AP Calculus is harder. However, calculus will be (somewhat) different from the math you’ve done before, and you might like it better.
I don’t know about your school’s curriculum, but for me, precalc was an exact repeat of Algebra 2/trig. AP calc AB is my favorite class EVER, and the first math class in which I haven’t understood something the first time around since squaring polynomials in Algebra 1. It’s definitely harder than precalc, and it helps if you have a geometric turn of mind, so you actually understand what you are doing. But then, as you can tell from my username, I do not have the average viewpoint on math in general.
At my school, precalc was easy and calc (dual-enroll through Pitt) was even easier. I hope what you’ve heard is true!
For me personally, I thought AP Calculus was harder than pre-calculus, but mostly because pre-calculus was largely just a review of algebra 1/2 topics, which I was already very familiar with.
Of course, one can make either course very difficult by adding a wide range of challenging problems to the curriculum.
I thought pre calc was much harder than ap calc. Different for everyone