I am a junior and so far a straight A student. There is a teacher who plans not to have any lessons or teach the course. The Calc BC course has no lessons but she poses fairly challenging questions on tests and quizzes. The questions are way above the level of the BC exam. It also takes up a lot of time. It is eating into my extra curricular research activities and I dont want that. Most of the students who do well either have tutors or parents who help them DAILY. It is true… without parent involvement, it is hard to do well. The teacher knows it. I am considering taking the Calc AB course which is considerably closer to the level of the AP program and also plan on sitting for the BC exam which is not so hard. How would it look if I only take the exam but skip the course? I am interested in a Engineering or Computer science at Berkeley, CMU, may be Harvey Mudd, Georgia Tech etc or one of the Ivies. I plan to take multivariable and linear algebra next year.
Most colleges don’t even require that you take calculus. So taking AB is fine. As for taking the exam and not the course, I don’t know if I’d even bother. You should check the websites of the schools you are interested in and see if they even give you credit for it. Harvey Mudd won’t.
Harvet Mudd is an outlier. Most schools will give credit, or at least placement, for a high score in BC, so I see not reason not to take the exam.
It’s fine. Colleges will be neutral on the matter, unless dropping a level results in your GC not marking your transcript as “most rigorous,” so you should check with him/her.
But if they offer multi-variable… will that not be the most rigorous?
My son will be in competition with other students from his own school who have committed to the BC course . My S might be at the bottom end of the arc in the class and might get his first B or B plus. It could move up to an A with a few hours every day. At least that is what it looks like right now. He will do fine on the final AP public exam. A few students are really well prepared, they have aced the Math competitions and already learned the foundational material, before coming to the class. They probably have tutors for three years as the Math Dept is particularly weak. Almost all the students I know are taught outside the class. There are a few kids who on par with my son’s level of knowledge but those kids are putting in many hours. They have prioritized that course. I just wonder if it is so important. He has two year long internships… writing a paper for a conference with post graduate students from a prestigious college and one with a prof at a community college which they also plan to publish. Both are very interesting… compared to the math … Calc BC which is doable but no where as interesting as the kind of pioneering work, the research will be. If he drops his sports activity, he could make time for it. But the sports keeps him healthy. It does take up whole Saturdays and two and half hours every day.
A friend of mine who had three kids in stem and all her kids got into a number of Ivies mentioned that the BC course is really important for a STEM student interested in a top engineering program. While a varsity captain of his sports team, he is not state level player. Mostly he does it for fun and good health… which we support. But he could scale back his sports if he is not seen as a serious science contender with a lower level math program.
IMO, yes. But HS’s don’t seem to utilize a standardized rubric for what “most rigorous” means. Just because I think it is, does not mean the GC would agree. That’s why I suggested getting feedback from the GC.
Thanks./