“Has anyone observed anything different?”
Other than some random anecdote.
No, but I do observe that all the elite schools offer Calc I, and even lower math classes. So some must be coming in without it.
Princeton must be admitting some students who are not even ready for calculus:
https://www.math.princeton.edu/undergraduate/course/MAT100
^ Princeton is far from alone.
Every college has a sub-calculus class. Look at the number of students who take it. Often, it’s single digits.
As for Calculus I, at my kids’ college everyone was encouraged to take or re-take it unless they had a really sophisticated facility with proofs. And of course there were some students who really didn’t have an opportunity to take calculus because their schools didn’t offer it at all, which is different from the situation @ucbalumnus was describing.
You know, it’s only one class, fall only, seems to be capped at about 30 students. I doubt every freshman who needs a refresher is in it. But the existence of the class doesn’t mean calc isn’t a competitive expectation, for admission.
I don’t believe that every college has a sub-calculus math class. UCSB, as one example, does not, unless you want to count statistics without Calc. However, I suppose students at any UC could go across town to take a community college precalculus course, if necessary. Perhaps sub-calculus math is needed more at colleges that have elite humanities majors?
Math 15 at https://my.sa.ucsb.edu/catalog/2010-2011/CollegesDepartments/ls-intro/math.aspx?DeptTab=Courses is a precalculus course. For UCs, the minimum math requirement for frosh admission is geometry + algebra 2, or integrated math 3, although it is likely that having precalculus or higher in high school is looked at more favorably by admission readers. But since UCs do admit students with just the minimum math (or who did not learn precalculus well enough the first time in high school), they offer precalculus courses.
I was approaching this from the other standpoint. Suppose the student took AP Calc or comparable in high school, gets to highly selective school, wants to be a French lit or comm studies or art history major. Beyond any distribution requirements the school may have, is it really critical he go on with math?
I do not see anyone here arguing that such a student needs to go beyond calculus if not required or recommended for his/her major, post-graduation goals, or general education requirements, although some would recommend statistics for all students (and if the student knows calculus, s/he may prefer to take a statistics course that is not afraid to use calculus). Of course, some majors may have courses in quantitative methods, logic, etc. that tend to be easier for those with more strength and practice in math, even though calculus or precalculus may not be a formal prerequisite.
At P, seems MAT 100 would do the trick. Should they then continue? To me, depends. The opportunities in some non-stem fields can be enhanced by having a little more behind you than, say, just the ability to read, write, analyze in French, a long list of lit you’ve read.
While it’s great that your school district makes this accommodation, this is definitely not true for all schools. My son was in this exact situation due to getting on the wrong “on ramp” when they were tracking students in 7th grade.
Two years later we found out that at his high school…
- They didn’t allow students to double up geometry and algebra 2 in 10th grade.
- They didn’t allow any math credits from their own summer program to count unless it was “recovery credit” (in other words only if you were retaking because you failed).
- They didn’t allow community college math credits to satisfy prerequisites for high school math progression.
All school policy. Very rigid; no exceptions were made…Not for our request, and not for any other students that I was aware of.
Wow, that ^^^ is unusual by all things I have seen and known.
I take it the circumstances there were such that the school district did not wish to administer and assess students for competency and acceleration outside of the end-of-year tests and cumulative classroom grades which formed the final transcript grade.
I cannot imagine that policy could stay in place for long at this time,though.
@ucbalumnus That is the 2010-11 UCSB catalog. The current catalog is here: https://my.sa.ucsb.edu/catalog/Current/CollegesDepartments/ls-intro/math.aspx?DeptTab=Courses and lists no Precalculus class. Math 15 has not been offered at least since 2014, which is as far back as I can look at https://my.sa.ucsb.edu/public/curriculum/coursesearch.aspx
I looked for an answer to what happens if you fail the math placement test to take Math 3A (Calc I), and the answer on Reddit appears to be that you can retake the online placement test until you pass it or take Math 34A, which is Calculus for Social and Life Sciences.
There is a Math 100 to 103 series intended for education majors regarding teaching elementary and secondary math.
http://www.math.ucsb.edu/ugrad/placement.php is UCSB’s math placement guide. It does not say what students need to do if they do not score high enough to take Math 3A but need that course for their majors. Perhaps they want students to self-review the precalculus material and try again?
I know of a LARGE number of majors- including those at elite schools, that do not require calculus. In fact, I know of a decent number that don’t require any math for lots of types of majors
With the exception of hardcore STEM centered colleges like Caltech or MIT, if calc I is the minimum requirement for admission for the Ivies/peer elites…prospective/entering classes into humanities/social science departments are likely to take a visible hit.
They’d also wouldn’t offer remedial math classes below Calc for incoming first-years.
Why would they need to if everyone admitted already completed calculus? They can start math at Calc II and offer Calc I on a refresher/remedial basis for students who feel the need or whose math stats indicate they may need it.
While the STEM uber alles and some who feel this is a good shortcut to weed out weaker candidates, using such a blunt yardstick would likely mean one may end up rejecting a potentially groundbreaking aspiring writer, historian, literary scholar, artist, journalist, etc.
Look, I speak in terms of a general tendency, a statistical norm if you will; yet many folks countered with antidotes from the far, right tail. We are not talking about the same thing. The plural of antidote is not data.
Instead of responding individually, it may be better simply to present the empirical evidence that inform my opinion. Here is the famous Duke study where Arcidiacono found weaker students switch from what they wanted to study to what they can handle to protect their GPA. He found subjects such as natural sciences, engineering and economics are “more difficult, associated with higher study times, and are more harshly graded”.
http://public.econ.duke.edu/~psarcidi/grades_4.0.pdf
The Wellesley study on grading inequality comes to the same conclusion: students switch to departments that give easy grades. Here is a nice summary of research done in the area:
" Based in part on grades, students make choices about how hard to work (Babcock 2009), courses (Sabot and Wakemann-Linn 1991), majors, and careers. ……, graduate schools make choices about whom to admit (Wongsurawat 2009), and employers make choices about whom to hire (Chan, Hao, and Suen 2007).
"http://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.28.3.189
The work coming out of Vanderbilt also tells a similiar story. Some subjects require stronger critical thinking skills than others:
http://qz.com/334926/your-college-major-is-a-pretty-good-indication-of-how-smart-you-are/
No surprise really, but his work neatly dovetails with what we know from GRE scores:
http://mjperry.blogspot.com/search?q=GRE+scores
I can list antidotal evidence from people such as Jeff Bezo, Vernon Smith, Laszlo Bock and Jim Manzi as well, but I think my point is made. So yes, I stand behind my position.
PG, I said what I said and you can interpret them anyway you choose, but it is only your interpretation; it certainly is not mine. Can we not take a lesson from Voltaire, and learn to disagree without being disagreeable?
With all due respect, I think you just proved my point from an earlier post. This is a correspondence bias.
And here’s what one of your sources says:
On average, across all sorts of institutions, are American Studies or Psychology majors going to have lower math SAT scores than Engineering majors and Physics majors? Sure. I don’t doubt that in the least. Are there more Psychology majors who would choose Engineering or Physics if they thought they could pass the courses (or if they could get accepted to the major) than the other way around? I can easily believe that, too, although I doubt the percentage of Psychology majors in that position is very high. But all of that tells you the equivalent of nothing about capability if you happen to have one specific Psychology major in front of you.
There are people who major in Psychology at MIT – to take this back to the original question of this thread – and it’s likely not because they are too dumb to succeed in another field.
This board is a pretty skewed look at reality. We talk about the most competitive colleges and then talk about the top students at those schools. This is so different than looking at a broad spectrum.
In my bubble most kids take Calculus and do extremely well on the math SAT. People don’t think the math SAT is that difficult. In this bubble there are many kids who could do STEM, and excel, but prefer to do something else.
For a while in 2009, I knew a bunch of kids making jokes about what their business major buddies were going to do with those degrees. Those kids are all in tenure track jobs. They are outliers, but my norm.