<p>Back in the seventies, IIRC, lots of schools used Apostol for their honors calc classes, for students who scored above 700 on old SAT and got A’s in high school math. Most of these students would also have already taken high school calculus.</p>
<p>I remember 2/3 of my own honors calc class at a small LAC dropping after the first semester, though. Pre-meds (except for a very few) did not want to work that hard, and many others who would have done fine with the standard text (Thomas?) decided that they just weren’t suited to learn math, in spite of previous success and high SAT scores, once they got a B or C. The second semester did seem easier. (Perhaps we had gotten used to the instructor and text?) But, nearly all of the several students my year who ended up majoring in math had passed on the honors intro class and taken the regular calc classes.</p>