AP really equal college intro?

[Joan in GE]

not in math and science -at our university, math and physics courses assign weekly graded homework.

 

Not in MY AP courses as I just assigned the grade after we had the AP test score back... 5 = A, 4 = B, and so forth.

 

However, in high school situations, yes AP courses get more graded work than what happens in my boys 4 year college classes - though DE English at the cc was similar to AP in graded work.

 

In watching dd doing her AP Human Geo...it seems like there is a lot of graded work...but maybe that is to make up for the lack of 'class' in RL....

 

So creekland - you mean you never graded anything during the year of prep for an AP class? Your dc did all the grading?

[LizzyBee]

Yes, there's something very strange going on here.

 

If she has not had a THOROUGH exposure to Taylor series (and Maclaurin series, which are a special case of the Taylor series), as well as multiple techniques of integration including trigonometric substitution, partial fractions, and integration by parts, differential equations (usually required for engineering majors) will be incredibly difficult and she'll need to do a lot of self-teaching. This material will also be required in many engineering classes. Placing her out of Calc II with Calc AB is crazy.

 

FWIW, at our university, for half of Calc II we do volumes of revolution and integration techniques, and then the entire second half of Calc II is sequences and series. This material is notoriously difficult.

 

Thanks. I sent dd this information. She is extremely gifted in math and I suspect she can fill in these gaps if she knows which topics she's missed. But she's going to have a difficult time progressing if she doesn't backtrack and close the gaps. We have a friend who teaches college math; maybe she can get some tutoring from him or her high school calc teacher over Christmas break.

[creekland]

So creekland - you mean you never graded anything during the year of prep for an AP class? Your dc did all the grading?

 

No, there was no grading. I'm kind of an unschooler at heart I suppose. For our AP level classes (not called AP) kiddos had the book(s) including a TE if I could snag one, a prep book, and totally did everything they wanted on their own including problems, any quizzes, any tests, any papers, labs (some of these we did together pending what it was, but usually I wanted them to take the initiative - my kids are superb with a microscope ;)). They needed examples of their work for our annual portfolio and they decided what to include. Nothing was officially graded.

 

The exception was Calc. Oldest did that using Chalkdust and I graded it. Middle chose Thinkwell and it was graded online, so he had a grade for that. Bio, Chem, Psych, and Stats were independent at the upper level (with discussions). English I farmed out to our cc.

 

It wasn't conventional I suppose, but my guys appear well prepared for college. That was my goal. I wanted them to know how to learn independently and to love learning just for the pure knowledge. The official grade? That could easily come from the AP when they took the test. I kind of made one up when they didn't.

 

We did not do early high school classes this way. They were more traditional, except I let them choose their own schedules - working longer or less on a subject if they wanted to - as long as everything was completed by the end of the semester/year. We did tests, graded papers, and the usual stuff. By the time they reached advanced courses, I wanted them to learn independently to set them up for doing so in college.

[SheilaZ]

I see most people have already posted what I think also.

 

As a biology and chemistry major, AP biology, AP chemistry, and AP calculus were just warm ups for my actual core courses. (I did use Campbell's Biology for both High school and Biology 101 and 102 for majors.)

Actually, AP calculus did more to hurt my math than help it.

 

AP english got me out of 1 (of 2) semesters of english. But I think the placement test were what helped more than my AP scores.

AP US history didn't count at all because I needed a world history and some other history other than US.

 

All that said, I'm torturing my high school junior with the same AP course I was tortured with. :lol: