@Ohiomomof2 Lol! Those are fighting words on CC but I agree with your last sentence wholeheartedly.
So the advanced students take calculus in high school, and the non-advanced students don’t take it at all. Really. Then what accounts for all those sections of Calculus I at almost every college?
I don’t think the statement is all inclusive. There are degrees that require Calculus that never really use it (most business majors) so non-advanced students will have to take it. But if the requirement is simply a quantative requirement, the student is unlikely to pick calculus over college Algebra or stats.
Some of those sections are filled with students who took Calculus in high school and are repeating it to cushion their GPA for other subjects or for medical school.
@“Cardinal Fang” - got me! I know my D’s roommate is totally psyched that due to the open curriculum at their school she can avoid taking math again, ever. But even at schools with gen-ed requirements, there’s usually another way to fill the math requirement, besides Calculus.
I’m certainly not saying students who aren’t “into” math don’t ever take Calculus in college, only that they don’t have to - there are other options for them if they aren’t going to major in a field that requires it as a course or as a pre-req. Obviously if the kid wants to do Chem or wants to be pre-med or whatever, s/he’s going to have to take Calc, and more than just that too.
*Edited to add: I said “I suspect” - I actually have no idea how many college students take Calc. I suppose there’s a way to look that up somehow. *
I’m well aware of the STEM-or-die culture of many posters here on CC, but I am, and know, many people who have terrific lives without Calc so I stand by my statement, incendiary as it may be 
@OHMomof2, I’m in complete agreement with you about that many students do not need to study calculus and would be better off studying a different area of mathematics. As Pizzagirl has said upthread, calculus is fetishized at some high-performing high schools and among some ambitious students and parents.
That’s no longer as viable at many respectable and elite colleges I know of. While many of those colleges do offer pre-calculus, many of them won’t count the pre-calc course towards fully fulfilling the quantitative proficiency requirement. Only math courses from Calc I onward will count…and some of them may require two such courses/full year sequence…not just a semester for all majors.
My LAC is an exception as one can get around taking calc to fulfill quantitative proficiency requirement when I attended by doing the following:
Taking one(1 full quant proficiency requirement) or two courses(each half quant proficiency) with heavy quant content. For instance, one classmate fulfilled his requirement by taking stats and others did so by taking one CS course for majors.
Taking a math department administered placement exam.
From what I’ve seen, passing calc I is commonly viewed in many respectable/elite college environments and some academically competitive high schools as a litmus test to see if someone is reasonably intelligent/well-prepared for college in the general educational sense or not.
You can avoid taking Calculus (in terms of distribution requirements, not major requirements for math or science majors) at Amherst, Brown, Columbia, Emory, Williams, Yale…I sort of stopped looking after that.
It might be easier if you tell me what schools DO require all students to take Calculus.
Who doesn’t take calculus…? An awful lot of majors, some of whom even go on to productive and lucrative careers. Contrary to CC lore- calculus is not a prerequisite for a happy life
It does not appear it is required at Harvard as part of the general education requirements.
Regarding AB and BC Calculus, @ucbalumnus, it depends on the whole sequence. I went to a good school and was on the top track, and we went directly from Algebra II with Trig into AB Calculus, which was then partly precalculus content until the AB content. We took BC Calc the next year, along with some enrichment units on Linear Algebra and a few simple Differential Equations (my teacher both years had been an MIT PhD in Math but was squeezed out by sexism according to my father who knew somehow). So classes can be called various things, but seeing AB, BC as a track is not necessarily a bad thing. My own son took a Precalc course and then BC, and covered much the same stuff in his top track at a different good school.
@PickOne1 @Waiting2exhale I love the PhD mentor option, but was irked to see it’s only on Saturdays…there are no observant Jewish (or Seventh Day) kids in the top levels?
@Pizzagirl - totally agree that if you’re bored, you can do something about it. If my kids announce boredom, there are many chores to be done, same as my own mom. On the other hand, pull-out math for kids who need it, is so wonderful. I remember the joy of it as a little girl myself.
Son was able to multiply fractions in elementary school (third I think?) and the teacher was having the kids use crayons to color x pieces of a pizza to represent/understand fractions. Sure I guess he could put anchovies and pepperoni on the pizza but somehow I do not think it was the best use of his time.
@yearstogo - Your son needed more math, definitely! My son got in “trouble” in Kindergarten. I got a phone call because he was “misusing classroom equipment” and I envisioned bopping someone on the head with a meter stick as a sword. But no, he was playing with an addition-dice manipulative at the station but doing multiplication games instead. The teacher told me, “that’s totally inappropriate for someone his age.” Ideally for your son, there would have been a pizza-based extension (?) he could have done.
There was no extension at the time despite our requests. The next year, the fourth grade teacher supported him working independently which was not ideal but better than what he had done in the classroom the previous few years.
The course plans for engineering majors at many colleges generally start with calculus 1, with the assumption that students have completed precalculus in high school (students with calculus AP credit may have the option of starting in a more advanced math course at many colleges). There are also many other majors (e.g. biology, business, economics, for more common examples) that do require calculus, but which include many students who are not top-end students in math. Remember, not everyone is headed toward a super-selective school where calculus in high school is the predominant level of math achievement among entering frosh, so most colleges offer calculus 1, and many students enroll in that course.
Actually, here is an engineering flowchart that starts with precalculus (MATH 240): http://coes.latech.edu/assets/curriculum_me_flow_128.pdf . See page 195 of http://www.latech.edu/registrar/bulletin/2015-2016_2.pdf for math course descriptions. What it means is that there are students in math-intensive majors who are not advanced in math (taking calculus in high school) and may even be behind in math at high school graduation / college entry.
Yes, many students will attend college where calculus is not necessary for either their majors or general education requirements. However, this is not necessarily the case for all non-advanced-in-math students.
According to the College Board (https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/research/2015/Program-Summary-Report-2015.pdf), about 14,000 high schools offer Calc AB and about 7000 offer Calc BC. Some schools offer both and some offer only one, so it’s not clear how much overlap there is.
The 14,000 number is about the same as the number of high schools that offer AP English Lit and more than those that offer APUSH, but there are somewhere around 26,000 public high schools plus some number of private high schools in the US. So, it’s fair to say that there a lot of schools that don’t offer calculus, and pretty much so all colleges need to provide Calc I for those who haven’t taken it before as an option. (Caltech is the exception I think.)
About 300,000 kids took the Calc AB test and about 115,000 took Calc BC. Since about 3 million kids graduate per year, about 10% plus have had some calculus.
As far as the early math discussion from several pages back, ~32,500 kids took Calc BC as juniors, ~4,000 took it as sophomores (my son was one of those and there are several others at his school), ~400 took it as freshmen (we know two kids in that category), and ~60 kids took it before 9th grade (don’t know any of those in our district).
Of course, they could have taken the class but not the exam due to their age.
Keep in mind that some schools that offer XYZ course do not offer it in a classroom setting. It may only be offered as self study.
Yeah it hardly gets STEM-ier than engineering. I was making an assumption that certainly anyone can challenge, that kids who don’t like or do well in math are probably not going to go into STEM fields like engineering that require lots of math and thus can easily go through high school and college without Calculus.
However I am sure there are kids who aren’t on the “fast math” track who do, in fact, take Calculus in college because their chosen major does in fact require it.
But this is what I already said in my previous posts.
While that assumption may be mostly true, it is not the same as the assumption in reply #939 that all students on the non-advanced math track (completing precalculus in 12th grade) are the type of students who will choose a major and college that do not require calculus.
@TheGFG You mean 8th graders not take the AP test because of their age, I guess. (I think it’s fairly common for seniors to not take the test if they’ve decided on a college that doesn’t give AP credit.) Personally, I wouldn’t recommend waiting to take an AP test over a year later than you took the course. Though, if one were taking AB for a full year and BC for a full year, one might as well just take the BC test after the BC course.
My son took the AP Comp Sci test in 8th grade, though we did have to figure out how to register him for the test at the high school and get him excused from junior high classes. The logistics weren’t difficult. (He said the high school kids taking the test had a lot of “who are you?” questions, and he was a little embarrassed.) I would suppose that some high schools might make it more difficult for a younger kid to register for an AP test, but I don’t think they are supposed to according to the College Board.
If you look at the AP data, a bunch of junior high kids take AP Spanish.