Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Age or Ability Specific Forums High School Best H.S. class placement, grades vs challenge?

Go to the College Board Web site.

AP Calculus AB - One Semester/Quarter of college calculus. taught over one year of H.S.
AP Calculus BC Two Semesters/Quarters of college calculus. taught over one year of H.S.

This is the way college board expects them to be taken. The BC test has two parts and one gets two grades, one for the AP part and one for the BC part.

In our school district these are taught as an EITHER/OR. I have heard of school's that offer them instead as a two year sequence. But no H.S.'s that I know of do it that way. If my son was to take AB next year, and then take BC the following year he would spend a semester repeating the first semesters topics.

In our school district there are three tracks that have Trig/Calc A then Calc BC over two years. In our district you can have Calc BC as early as sophomore year. In our district I believe you can only take Calc AB senior year. I could be wrong but I don't see anywhere about taking BC without A.

nicoledad, I wonder if the course combo called Trig/CalcA is the equivalent of what our district calls "Pre-Calculus" - it follows Algebra II and is a pre-requisite for Calculus, and here includes Trigonometry. It's not an AP course thought - the only AP courses listed on the College Board site for Calc are "Calculus AB" and "Calculus BC". It also makes sense to limit Calc AB to seniors because if you take it as a junior, what math course makes sense to follow it? The first semester of Calc BC would be a total repeat of Calc AB, and there isn't an AP course covering second semester calculus only - so you'd either have to enroll in a local college or take it online. Plus most kids (I"m guessing all students really) who are advanced enough in ability to be plugged into pre-calc by the time they are sophomores really ought to be able to handle Calculus BC, and quite a few if not most of them might be bored with the pace of Calc AB.

polarbear

blue magic the other problem we're running into with ds' high school schedule is not enough elective options. This is in one way related to the GPA gotcha - everything is so cookie-cutter in high school - the race for the perfect gap, the insistence that all students take the same basic set of required courses. My ds' high school plan would be awesome if he was interested in pursuing language arts and history in post-secondary, but he wants to pursue STEM and has no room to add extra STEM classes. He wants to challenge himself, wants to study what he is most interested in and that will relate to his future university work, all things that should look good to a university when he applies... but the message from his high school is worry about grades over course content and don't stray from the cookie cutter path.

Sorry, venting a bit there. Perhaps I'lll be back to erase this last reply lol.

polarbear

My son will be a junior next year. Regardless of if he takes BC or AB Calculus next year, there is the question of what to take for math senior year. The standard for these students in my district is to either take AP Computer Science or AP Statistics. Not really satisfactory. Most of the juniors who take Calculus takes BC because they are the ones on the fast track. My son fell off the top track because of grades last year and is in regular pre-calc with juniors & seniors. The juniors will mostly take AB Calc next year.

I'm confused you write 'there are three tracks that have Trig/Calc A then Calc BC over two years'. This doesn't sounds right? Three tracks include Calc BC?

My guess is Trig/Calc A is equivilant what I'd call a Pre-Calculus class. So you take this and THEN a 2 year Calculus sequence?

If Calc BC is a two year sequence, you only take the AP Test at the end of the second year, right? My district essentially does this with AP Literature. It's really two classes, Honors American Lit and then AP English Lit with the AP test taken at the end of two years.

The math classes in my district in the same tracks bleed into each other. The Honors Pre-Calculus class that leads to BC Calc covers a fair amount of beginning Calculus for example, giving the kids a bit less to cover over the school year before the AP TEST. This can be very confusing since schools label their classes differently.

Even after sophomore year? Sorry to hear that. My son has a fair amount of room in his schedule. Well if band didn't take up two classes. He doesn't have to take any social studies next year. Officially he only HAS to take English, since he will have passed all the science/math requirements by then. By junior year you are allowed to double up in science.

For us, challenge and high grades are not reverse correlated. That is, DD's more likely to bomb an easy class and get a low grade than a harder one. Probably due to a combination of boredom, overconfidence (I don't have to pay attention, it's all too easy), and over-thinking.

In addition, learning to work hard and fail well are some of the most critical things she can learn to make it through both college and life. She'll never learn that going for the easy stuff. I'd rather she get into a decent college with decent grades (but knowing how to hustle her buns and pick herself back up when she falls) than a top college without those abilities.

Now, we're still in middle school (barely) so my attitude might change under the considerable pressure of the university admissions frenzy... but I hope not.

My explanation may be confusing. One of the tracks you can take is accelerated algebra 2, Trig/ Calc A, Calculus BC over a three year period. That sequence can start in 8th, 9th or 10th grade. I believe you are correct about AP test after BC. My daughter will start the sequence in 8th grade next year. thus junior and senior year she will have to find something else to take.

BC following AB is the *recommended* sequence at our h.s. However, they are *allowing* our twins to do AB on their own between now and the end of summer (with no credit awarded) in order to jump from Precalc (which they started last fall and just finished on their own, for credit) to BC next fall.