Does calculus count too much for admissions?

[Frances]

On 2/14/2022 at 12:36 PM, kokotg said:

I think they do consider it...like nearly everyone at a very selective engineering school will come in with calculus. But the conventional wisdom is that calculus is the harder class than statistics, so when admissions departments are evaluating rigor, students who took calculus are seen as taking the more challenging course load. And, I mean, that's reinforced at the high school level. Students who don't do well in pre-calc are recommended for stats instead of calculus. So then when you're trying to make distinctions between a bunch of kids with near perfect grades and test scores, course selection is another thing you look at closely. Honestly, I'm not even sure what the solution is. Maybe it will fix itself because birth rates are going to start to be less favorable for highly selective colleges soon! 

ETA: I guess making AP Stats harder is one possibility. But I don't know enough about AP stats to know if that's feasible or not.

While I agree it is a problem, as someone with a Master’s degree in Statistics, I do generally think non-calculus based Statistics is an easier course than both pre-Calc and calculus, unless they are watered down or poorly taught. Statistics can be challenging in a different way and certainly helps strengthen analytical ability, but personally I found pre-Calc and Calculus much more difficult than the intro college stats class I took and the many intro stats college classes I was a TA for at a very selective U.

I will say that although it varies by college, in my experience with several LACs and a few universities, the humanities and social science requirement for everyone are generally far more rigorous than the science/math ones. Non-science majors generally have a choice of low level science and/or math classes that wouldn’t fulfill any requirement for a science or math major, while the science and math majors have to take all of their humanities, social science, etc courses at least the same level as intro courses for majors. 
 

 

Edited February 16, 2022 by Frances

[Frances]

On 2/14/2022 at 2:33 PM, Roadrunner said:

I didn’t intend it 🤣

I meant to say in a competitive and wealthy school where kids have ambitious goals (a ton of kids trying for Stanford, Pomona, and the likes) you would think that many would want to go into BC, but at the most, AB is what they attempt. In fact pretty much everybody in our district manages to finish precalc as a junior because of the way they stack math classes. Very few kids wouldn’t be calculus ready by junior or senior year. So having only 15 kids out of several hundred attempt BC was unexpected to me. I would guess Bay Area is different. 

But doing a two semester college class in one year while taking numerous other high school classes would be a very intense load for anyone not good at math with a very solid foundation. Plus I’m sure they are all devoting lots of time to ECs.

I’m actually glad my small, rural Midwest high school stopped at preCalc. Otherwise, I likely would never have taken college calculus with amazing professors who ended up setting me on a path as a non math major to a grad degree in Statistics from an Ivy League university. I was fortunate that my algebra prep in high school was extremely solid. My pre-Calc, on the other hand, was so bad that I chose to retake it in college despite having an ACT score that exempted me from the math requirement. Had I taken calculus in high school, it’s hard to imagine I would gone back down to pre-Calc in college.

[Frances]

On 2/14/2022 at 3:31 PM, kokotg said:

(Hi. I can talk about college admissions for far too long). There are (at least) a couple of different things going on here. My personal pet peeve is the way that statistics gets the short of the stick when it comes to determinations of rigor, even though it makes more sense for most non STEM kids to take, and that's the thing that affects my own kids the most:

But then the bigger issue is equity. If 79% of Wesleyan students took calculus in high school, but only 50% of high schools offer calculus...well, you don't need to have taken calculus to do that math. 

Incidentally, I'm quoting from the report linked to in the article I posted above: https://justequations.org/wp-content/uploads/Just-Equations-2021-Report-New-Calculus-Final-Digital.pdf

 

But who is going to apply to Wesleyan and choose to attend and have the academic preparation to compete there? Unfortunately, it’s a sad fact that many of our high schools are failing our students on multiple levels, including providing them with a rigorous enough education to not just get admitted to a college like Wesleyan, but actually be prepared for the coursework there.

And as I mentioned upthread, I think calculus (and even pre-calculus of taught right) are more difficult than Statistics. I completely agree, however, that Statistics is likely more useful for many students. Heck, I think both Economics and Statistics would more useful than Calculus for many students.

Edited February 16, 2022 by Frances

[Frances]

On 2/14/2022 at 3:39 PM, kokotg said:

I guess my beef with it is that there are other advanced maths that would be more helpful to a humanities major, and they're discouraged from taking them if they plan to apply to selective colleges. But then it's also true that AP stats is easier than AP calc, so that's where I'm not sure what the solution is. 

They can take Calculus in high school for the admissions bump and then take Statistics in college.

[Frances]

On 2/14/2022 at 3:51 PM, kokotg said:

Certainly. But many/most non-stem kids who have any AP math credit probably won't take any math in college. And I think stats is something that it's good to have just to be a good citizen of the world, whether or not it's required for a degree. 

 

It’s generally required for every social science major. Personally, I think every college student should be required to take both Statistics and Economics. They certainly seem far more useful to me than many of the other requirements I see.

[Frances]

15 hours ago, Sebastian (a lady) said:

And yet, the decision about who gets to study to become and engineer is often based in a math tracking choice made in middle school. That should not be the pivotal moment, imho.

But the reality is that even without tracking, the decision is often made for you due to lack of preparation. A coworker of mine got into University of Washington engineering out of a small, rural in-state high school that didn’t offer calculus. She struggled mightily competing with students who had taken BC Calc, AP Physics, AP Chem, and other advanced classes not offered in her high school. She eventually dropped out and went back to college many years later for a BS and then an MS in Economics. She had the math ability, but at 18, did not have the math background to do engineering at a selective state U.

[Frances]

13 hours ago, Serenade said:

This is an interesting discussion. My kids are beyond this now, but both kids took their high school higher math classes at the CC.  Both took/are taking the path of Associates Degree then transferring to a 4 year school with one kid being a biology major/chem minor and the other transferring into a mechanical engineering program this fall.   My son who is the bio major was required to take Calc for his degree, and he did well, but he told me that the basic stats class he had back at the CC has been way more valuable in his bio classes than the Calc class ever will be.  Which makes me wonder, why doesn't the bio degree require stats instead of calc?  Stats is encouraged, but it's not required. 

I think this is going to vary widely across colleges. Some will require stats, others calculus. Some will require physics, others won’t. Some will require a year of college chemistry before intro bio, others will require a semester or none before intro bio.

Edited February 16, 2022 by Frances

[Sneezyone]

4 minutes ago, Frances said:

But the reality is that even without tracking, the decision is often made for you due to lack of preparation. A coworker of mine got into University of Washington engineering out of a small, rural in-state high school that didn’t offer calculus. She struggled mightily competing with students who had taken BC Calc, AP Physics, AP Chem, and other advanced classes not offered in her high school. She eventually dropped out and went back to college many years later for a BS and then an MS in Economics. She had the math ability, but at 18, did not have the math background to do engineering at a selective state U.

This is more of a counseling failure tho. There are schools that specialize in taking students with ability but not opportunity to engineering degree completion and they would likely welcome and reward a rural student from WA with merit aid.

[Frances]

14 hours ago, Sneezyone said:

This is more of a counseling failure tho. There are schools that specialize in taking students with ability but not opportunity to engineering degree completion and they would likely welcome and reward a rural student from WA with merit aid.

Yes, most definitely. Counselor failures are absolutely rampant in public high schools. I sadly have lots of other similar stories of college mismatch due to poor or nonexistent high school counseling.

Edited February 16, 2022 by Frances

[Frances]

13 hours ago, Dmmetler said:

That's school dependent. The LAC L attends requires statistics for bio majors (including Public Health/Pre-Med and Neuroscience). Having said that, the course required is Calculus based, and I'm guessing there aren't many STEM majors there who haven't had calculus in high school, so it might simply be that with most kids coming in with calculus vs Stats, it makes more sense to make Statistics the required first semester math class. 

That’s impressive that they require calculus based statistics. I wonder how common that is for biology majors? I honestly haven’t heard of it before.

[Frances]

12 hours ago, Farrar said:

Basically, yes. Calculus is college level material. I'm not a math expert, but as I understand it, if you're going to teach calculus, you're going to cover at least the majority of the syllabus for AP Calculus AB, so you may as well teach it. So it's not like, say, US history where you could teach a version that's AP and a version that's not. Note that there are two AP's - Calculus AB and Calculus BC. AB is the shorter syllabus. BC covers everything in AB and more.

AB covers the first semester of college Calc, BC covers the first year of college Calc. Lots of big colleges offer several different versions of Calc, including Calc for biological sciences, Calc for physical sciences, regular Calc, proof based Calc, Calc for business majors, etc. I’m guessing most high schools have little or no variety in their calculus offerings beyond that brought to the table by different teachers.

Edited February 16, 2022 by Frances

[regentrude]

4 hours ago, Frances said:

I will say that although it varies by college, in my experience with several LACs and a few universities, the humanities and social science requirement for everyone are generally far more rigorous than the science/math ones. Non-science majors generally have a choice of low level science and/or math classes that wouldn’t fulfill any requirement for a science or math major, while the science and math majors have to take all of their humanities, social science, etc courses at least the same level as intro courses for majors. 

Yup. That has always bothered me. I am all for a well-rounded education (and I am  a writer, so English is dear to my heart), but if my physics majors have to take 2 semesters of composition, 1 literature class, and 5 more classes in the humanities and social sciences, why don't humanities/social science majors have to take 8 math and science classes? There is a distinct asymmetry.

Edited February 16, 2022 by regentrude

[Farrar]

I guess in thinking about whether or not you could offer a high school calculus course that wasn't AP, it was more about incentives. Like, if you're going to offer a course that covers a large portion of the material, what's the incentive to not take it/offer it as AP? I don't see much of one when colleges will still prefer the AP version. I just had to advise a kid about which calculus to take dual enrollment. Kid is literally going into a biology field. But I had to tell them to take Calc for engineers, not calc for the life sciences, because one is university transferable and the other is not.

[kokotg]

There does seem to be a trend to offer non-AP calculus (my husband's school started offering it a few years ago). According to the survey in the report, admissions people still look more favorably on on-AP calc than on AP stats. From what I can tell, it's a good life raft for kids who would be in over their heads with an AP class but find themselves needing to take calc because of how they were placed back in 7th or 8th grade. How useful the class is probably depends on the situation....my husband tutored one kid who struggled with AB in 11th grade but likely could have handled it and done okay with a lot of effort; she decided to switch to non-AP calc just because the stress wasn't worth it to her, and she's doing great in the (very) slow paced class. Since she's just in 11th grade, it means she can still take AP calc next year if she wants and get that AP credit, and it will likely be a lot easier because she's had a gentle introduction to the subject this year. 

[Roadrunner]

21 minutes ago, Farrar said:

I guess in thinking about whether or not you could offer a high school calculus course that wasn't AP, it was more about incentives. Like, if you're going to offer a course that covers a large portion of the material, what's the incentive to not take it/offer it as AP? I don't see much of one when colleges will still prefer the AP version. I just had to advise a kid about which calculus to take dual enrollment. Kid is literally going into a biology field. But I had to tell them to take Calc for engineers, not calc for the life sciences, because one is university transferable and the other is not.

It’s more than that. If one changes his mind and decides to go further than calculus, you can’t move one with a non AP version. You have to either have an AP score or a DE grade to take the next level up. Or you end up repeating.
At our CC you can place into calculus now by showing you took precalculus. In the past you could do a placement test. No such option for calculus 3. You have to prove proficiency either by AP grade or a college class. They won’t accept a high school class grade alone. So more incentive to opt for an AP.

 

[Farrar]

17 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:

It’s more than that. If one changes his mind and decides to go further than calculus, you can’t move one with a non AP version. You have to either have an AP score or a DE grade to take the next level up. Or you end up repeating.
At our CC you can place into calculus now by showing you took precalculus. In the past you could do a placement test. No such option for calculus 3. You have to prove proficiency either by AP grade or a college class. They won’t accept a high school class grade alone. So more incentive to opt for an AP.

 

Exactly.

It's so tough because I don't think these are always the right decisions educationally. I think we have to find a balance between satisfying the powers that be, the goals that kids have, etc. and actually giving them the education they need. Both my boys wanted to do calculus, so Mushroom is doing AP Calc AB right now and getting a fine grade, but he knows he's abysmal at tests and will likely just have to repeat it and is fine with that. 

[regentrude]

49 minutes ago, Farrar said:

I guess in thinking about whether or not you could offer a high school calculus course that wasn't AP, it was more about incentives. Like, if you're going to offer a course that covers a large portion of the material, what's the incentive to not take it/offer it as AP? I don't see much of one when colleges will still prefer the AP version. I just had to advise a kid about which calculus to take dual enrollment. Kid is literally going into a biology field. But I had to tell them to take Calc for engineers, not calc for the life sciences, because one is university transferable and the other is not.

The incentive is for students for whom the AP pace does not work and who will retake calc 1 in college anyway. It is great to have prior exposure to the material. many students who test out of calc 1 because of AP scores don't actually have the mastery and struggle in calc 2.

I think it is not always in the student's best interest to look at what is transferable credit - long term mastery is more important.

[regentrude]

22 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:

It’s more than that. If one changes his mind and decides to go further than calculus, you can’t move one with a non AP version. You have to either have an AP score or a DE grade to take the next level up. Or you end up repeating.
At our CC you can place into calculus now by showing you took precalculus. In the past you could do a placement test. No such option for calculus 3. You have to prove proficiency either by AP grade or a college class. They won’t accept a high school class grade alone. So more incentive to opt for an AP.

The few high school students who are ready for multivariable calculus should be able to do fine on the AP BC. (One can take AP exams without having taken an AP course)

But there are many, many more students who would benefit from a first exposure into calculus and who would then repeat it in a  more rigorous form at college.

 

[Roadrunner]

6 minutes ago, regentrude said:

The few high school students who are ready for multivariable calculus should be able to do fine on the AP BC. (One can take AP exams without having taken an AP course)

But there are many, many more students who would benefit from a first exposure into calculus and who would then repeat it in a  more rigorous form at college.

 

I don’t disagree. 
I was just saying it makes a lot of sense to attempt an AP exam (AB or BC) than opt for a non AP version.
I would advice my kid into at least an AB Calc over non AP even for non STEM. Say a kid ends up going into business major where Calculus 1 is required. By taking an AP version you at least get a shot at being done with math if you score well enough. The worst case scenario is you repeat the class in college. But if you opt for non AP version, you never get that shot. 
Or you end up in college and then decide you want to major in something that requires Calculus 2. If you have a score from AB, you get to place into Calc 2. My friend’s DS took Calc BC in our PS and only passed the AB section. He was able to go straight into Calc 2 at the university (did very well!) and is now taking Calculus 3. That score saved him from repeating a class. 
 Just saying might as well tackle an exam if you are going to do the work. 

[regentrude]

1 minute ago, Roadrunner said:

I don’t disagree. 
I was just saying it makes a lot of sense to attempt an AP exam (AB or BC) than opt for a non AP version.
I would advice my kid into at least an AB Calc over non AP even for non STEM. Say a kid ends up going into business major where Calculus 1 is required. By taking an AP version you at least get a shot at being done with math if you score well enough. The worst case scenario is you repeat the class in college. But if you opt for non AP version, you never get that shot. 
Or you end up in college and then decide you want to major in something that requires Calculus 2. If you have a score from AB, you get to place into Calc 2. My friend’s DS took Calc BC in our PS and only passed the AB section. He was able to go straight into Calc 2 at the university (did very well!) and is now taking Calculus 3. That score saved him from repeating a class. 
 Just saying might as well tackle an exam if you are going to do the work. 

Sure, absolutely - for a student who has the ability to thoroughly grasp the material at that pace and do well on the exam.
There are plenty of students for whom that is not the case. And, again, a lot of students who score ok on the exam do not have the knowledge that would have been taught in a rigorous calc 1 course at university. I am advisor and see the freshmen math placement test results. You wouldn't believe how many students with Calc 1 AB credit fail the college algebra/trig placement exams. You really wonder how much teaching-to-the-test is going on at the expense of long-term mastery of the fundamentals.

 

[Clemsondana]

I don't know what is offered there now, but when I was in high school back in the dark ages only a handful of us took AP calc (I don't think any passed - the set-up was that the teacher was teaching something to a class in the front of the classroom while we sat in the back and watched videos of a college prof and then were supposed to do it ourselves without asking questions).  The majority of college bound kids took a non-AP calc class that was more like 'intro to calculus'.  We all would have been better off in it because they actually learned the things that they did cover, making it a decent intro to college calc if they needed it. 

I was talking with a friend who teaches at a major state U - I was asking about APs and DEs for my kid.  She said that a lot of AP doesn't directly translate to anything besides elective credits in most programs.  We were talking with a retired teacher who used to teach AP Human Geography, which is where they stick most college-track kids here.  He said that he doesn't get it - he taught the class, but it's mostly useless since the AP credit isn't good for much of anything.  They tell kids that it's the only rigorous social studies option for freshmen.  I feel like we sometimes push kids to take all sorts of APs for the purpose of being competitive, at the expense of them actually learning anything useful.  My own kid will have some APs and DEs but we're choosing to do that in classes that naturally align with the test and using other classes to explore interesting things.  But, kid has very high scores and some awards and they are not interested in elite schools so they are looking at places with 40+% admission rates so it's a different consideration than if they wanted to to do a very low-admission-rate school.  

 

[Farrar]

45 minutes ago, regentrude said:

The incentive is for students for whom the AP pace does not work and who will retake calc 1 in college anyway. It is great to have prior exposure to the material. many students who test out of calc 1 because of AP scores don't actually have the mastery and struggle in calc 2.

I think it is not always in the student's best interest to look at what is transferable credit - long term mastery is more important.

Of course this is true. But the reality on the ground is that the course is worth a lot in admissions even without the scores, and kids who are good at school can usually game the course for at least a B even if they don't get the foundation they need. So then the incentive isn't there to not take it because there's a greater incentive to take it in order to get into college.

In order for students to be incentivized to take the course that would help their math education more, colleges would have to not give taking the higher AP course any preference in admissions. But why would they do that? And wouldn't that just penalize the kids who can handle it? 

[Lori D.]

6 hours ago, regentrude said:

Yup. That has always bothered me. I am all for a well-rounded education (and I am  a writer, so English is dear to my heart), but if my physics majors have to take 2 semesters of composition, 1 literature class, and 5 more classes in the humanities and social sciences, why don't humanities/social science majors have to take 8 math and science classes? There is a distinct asymmetry.

Not to nit-pick, but for many colleges, Foreign Language is either required or counts in that Humanities/Social Studies bundle. That's a huge swath of very different courses be counted under the same umbrella -- composition (learning to write) + Foreign Language + the wide range of Humanities/Social Sciences -- everything from study of peoples in various ways (Anthropology, Archeology, Sociology), to human thought (Psychology, Philosophy, Religious Studies), to the creative thought/endeavors of humans (Literature), to the study of communities and their structures (History, Geography, Gov't, Econ, Political Science).

I don't really think it is a fair comparison to lump all that vast diversity of topics into one category, and compare it to the Math/Natural Sciences category.

All majors (at least at the local university here) do require at least a minimum of 1 Math (College Algebra or above), and 2 Natural Science courses, for a total of 3 Math/Science classes.

So yes,requiring another 2 Natural Science courses (or an additional 1 Math + 1 Science would be great for a bit more balance.

But no,  8 + 8 is not really a fair balance because of the much broader range of topics in the Humanities / Social Studies / Composition / Foreign Language category.

Edited February 16, 2022 by Lori D.

[regentrude]

8 minutes ago, Farrar said:

In order for students to be incentivized to take the course that would help their math education more, colleges would have to not give taking the higher AP course any preference in admissions. But why would they do that? And wouldn't that just penalize the kids who can handle it? 

the vast majority of students attend colleges where admissions isn't really such a  big hurdle. Most colleges accept most students.

[regentrude]

5 minutes ago, Lori D. said:

Not to nit-pick,  but for many colleges, Foreign Language is either required or counts in that Humanities/Social Studies bundle. That's a huge swath of very different courses be counted under the same umbrella -- composition (learning to write), Foreign Language, and the wide range of Social Sciences -- everything from study of peoples in various ways (Anthropology, Archeology, Sociology), to human thought (Psychology, Philosophy, Religious Studies), to the creative thought/endeavors of humans (Literature), to the study of communities and their structures (History, Geography, Gov't, Econ, Political Science).

I don't really think it is a fair comparison to lump all that vast diversity of topics into one category, and compare it to the Math/Natural Sciences category.

All majors (at least at the local university here) do require at least a minimum of 1 Math (College Algebra or above), and 2 Natural Science courses, for a total of 3 Math/Science classes. So yes, I can agree to requiring another 2 Natural Science courses (or an additional 1 Math + 1 Science for a bit more balance. No, I don't think 8 + 8 would be a fair balance because of the broader range of topics in the Humanities/Social Studies/Composition/Foreign Language category.

There's a lot of diversity in math, natural sciences, and engineering. Heck, there's a lot of diversity in possible physics courses alone 🙂

 

Edited February 16, 2022 by regentrude

[Lori D.]

4 minutes ago, regentrude said:

the vast majority of students attend colleges where admissions isn't really such a  big hurdle. Most colleges accept most students.

Agree.

And just meaning this broadly, not to anyone in particular... in getting back to OPer's reasoning for feeling she must have her student take Calc vs Stats is for the scholarship $$ advantage that she feels it would give her student. (And that by taking Calc rather than Stats her student would be more competitive for admissions to selective schools that offer more financial aid to meet need.) 

Edited February 16, 2022 by Lori D.

[EKS]

On 2/14/2022 at 12:36 PM, kokotg said:

So then when you're trying to make distinctions between a bunch of kids with near perfect grades and test scores, course selection is another thing you look at closely. Honestly, I'm not even sure what the solution is.

IMO, one solution is to have an admissions test with an extremely high ceiling.

With regard to the original question--among other things, calculus in high school is being used as a proxy for intelligence.  Of course, it's not the only one.  Another is how much extracurricular stuff a kid does.  If you can get all As in a slate of rigorous courses and also do a bunch of stuff after school, you're probably more intelligent than a student who can't.

The more you get rid of direct measures of intelligence, the more people will rely on these sorts of proxies.  

[Lori D.]

4 minutes ago, regentrude said:

There's a lot of diversity in math, natural sciences, and engineering. Heck, there's a lot of diversity in possible physics courses alone 🙂

Agree -- but now we're adding Engineering into that Math/Natural Sciences bundle. And then we might as well also add Computer Sciences... 😉

[kokotg]

37 minutes ago, Clemsondana said:

 

I was talking with a friend who teaches at a major state U - I was asking about APs and DEs for my kid.  She said that a lot of AP doesn't directly translate to anything besides elective credits in most programs.  We were talking with a retired teacher who used to teach AP Human Geography, which is where they stick most college-track kids here.  He said that he doesn't get it - he taught the class, but it's mostly useless since the AP credit isn't good for much of anything.  They tell kids that it's the only rigorous social studies option for freshmen.  I feel like we sometimes push kids to take all sorts of APs for the purpose of being competitive, at the expense of them actually learning anything useful.  My own kid will have some APs and DEs but we're choosing to do that in classes that naturally align with the test and using other classes to explore interesting things.  But, kid has very high scores and some awards and they are not interested in elite schools so they are looking at places with 40+% admission rates so it's a different consideration than if they wanted to to do a very low-admission-rate school.  

 

This is an interesting example, because my oldest took AP Human Geography and has ended up doing a geography minor (or possibly but not likely a double major), and his AP credit actually did count for the required intro class for that. But even elective credits can help you graduate early or just free up space in your schedule to fit in other requirements. Also AP HUG is just an interesting class, and, yes, a fairly gentle intro to AP exams. 

Edited February 16, 2022 by kokotg

[regentrude]

13 minutes ago, Lori D. said:

Agree -- but now we're adding Engineering into that Math/Natural Sciences bundle. And then we might as well also add Computer Sciences... 😉

absolutely. 

[regentrude]

On the tangent topic of outside-of-major requirements:
I would be all in favor of relegating the well-rounded general education to high school and have college-bound high school students emerge from 12th grade like they do in my home state in Germany: having had math through calculus, two foreign languages with 10 and 6 years of instruction, respectively, physics, chemistry and biology yearly since the middle grades - and then have university focus on courses in the major only. 

But since the state of K-12 in this country is as sad as it is (except for a few, well-funded schools), we push things to expensive college that these students would have been perfectly capable of learning for free in their public high school. That's a fundamental flaw of the system, and a burden on families.
ETA: and this touches right on the issue of equity raised earlier in this thread

Edited February 16, 2022 by regentrude

[Farrar]

27 minutes ago, regentrude said:

the vast majority of students attend colleges where admissions isn't really such a  big hurdle. Most colleges accept most students.

Agreed. But we're not really talking about those kids. As pointed out before, there's a huge gap in who can even access any AP courses at all. This is also a big equity issue for accessing more selective colleges and part of why students at schools that don't offer these courses can't access them in the first place.

[Arcadia]

1 hour ago, regentrude said:

You wouldn't believe how many students with Calc 1 AB credit fail the college algebra/trig placement exams. You really wonder how much teaching-to-the-test is going on at the expense of long-term mastery of the fundamentals.

Firstly, teachers do have to teach to the test because there is only so many school days and April here is typically state testing season while early May is AP exams. Kids who are faster can just read and understand the skipped pages in their free time. Secondly, I think kids need to revise before a placement test. 
 

DS16 took AP Stats with chem in summer private school. He took AP Calc BC with AP Macro and AP Micro also in summer the following year. My slow poke could comfortably finish the statistics homework while DS17 had time to read the entire textbook (The Practice of Statistics for AP). The math textbook was the Calculus for AP by Larson and kid reread the book before taking his first math dual enrollment class.

I did make my teens take econs and stats and I did know my slowpoke could cope with them as summer classes. That way, my slowpoke could have his high school workload spread more evenly. The fact that the community college use their AP scores to fulfill the associate degree gen ed requirements was just cherry on top. 
 

[Clemsondana]

1 hour ago, kokotg said:

This is an interesting example, because my oldest took AP Human Geography and has ended up doing a geography minor (or possibly but not likely a double major), and his AP credit actually did count for the required intro class for that. But even elective credits can help you graduate early or just free up space in your schedule to fit in other requirements. Also AP HUG is just an interesting class, and, yes, a fairly gentle intro to AP exams. 

Sure-  I enjoyed having a bit more time after APing out of freshman English.  It's historically been hard for STEM folks to graduate too early just because there are often sequenced classes.  In my undergrad, almost all electives took place in your last 2 years because the early years were all about taking the basic science classes so that you could do research your senior year.  Looking at a couple of STEM majors, something like AP HuGeo would be an elective.  But, friend also said that schools are a lot more flexible with scheduling, letting motivated students take classes out of sequence, which could let them graduate early or take graduate classes in a way that we couldn't.  Which is great in some respects.  In other contexts a couple of friends who are long-tinne college instructors have talked about kids really struggling emotionally, being lonely, etc, in ways that they haven't seen before, and I'm wondering if going to college with everything indivudualized so that students don't have a cohort is having some unanticipated negative effects.  I haven't seen it first hand since I teach high schoolers and my college teaching experience was at a CC where most students were nontraditional (or at least most of mine were, since I taught Friday nights or Saturdays).  And this is rather off-topic - just a confluence of this thread and some recent texts with friends.  🙂 

Edited February 16, 2022 by Clemsondana

[regentrude]

25 minutes ago, Clemsondana said:

  In other contexts a couple of friends who are long-time college instructors have talked about kids really struggling emotionally, being lonely, etc, in ways that they haven't seen before, and I'm wondering if going to college with everything indivudualized so that students don't have a cohort is having some unanticipated negative effects. 

what time frames were they talking about? Pre-pandemic? It is most definitely something we observe now, and I blame the pandemic. Even with things a lot more open now, these kids are missing several semesters in terms of maturity, social development, self-sufficiency etc.
I don't think an individualized course of study is responsible - they still have their dorms, their extracurricular activities, their study groups for whatever course they are taking (and with tech, these are a lot easier to organize.)

[Arcadia]

@Serenade There is calculus offered at my school district. However, like @Roadrunner said, kids rather take the AP Calc AB class and hope to do well in the AP exam. Also the AP Calc AB class would help in the CSU/UC calculated weighted GPA since there is no honors Calc class. 
 

“Grades 11—12, Year (CSU/UC-C)
Prerequisite: C or better in Trigonometry or Trigonometry Honors.

This course will prepare the student to enter college with a year of calculus background so that the student will be ready for calculus at the college level. Students will study topics in analytic geometry, limit theory, derivatives and integrals.”

[Clemsondana]

9 minutes ago, regentrude said:

what time frames were they talking about? Pre-pandemic? It is most definitely something we observe now, and I blame the pandemic. Even with things a lot more open now, these kids are missing several semesters in terms of maturity, social development, self-sufficiency etc.
I don't think an individualized course of study is responsible - they still have their dorms, their extracurricular activities, their study groups for whatever course they are taking (and with tech, these are a lot easier to organize.)

Things are definitely worse now in many ways, but they've been talking about some growing problems for years.  Learned helplessness is a big one, and I keep thinking about how we worked together to figure things out so we didn't have to ask faculty for help as often.  The lack of cohort isn't the cause of the problem, but it could be exacerbating an underlying lack of confidence or competence.  Some of us had the same study partners for years - we weren't necessarily close friends outside of classwork, but it was comforting to get to the weeks before the test and know that I'd have Robyn to study with.  I remember a roommate whose group met twice afternoons each week for a year, across multiple classes in their major, to work problems, and husband had an almost identical schedule with 2 other guys their last 2-3 years of college and they did most group projects together.  If we got overwhelmed by a class, or couldn't figure something out, we had people that we knew to troubleshoot with - one of us had figured out when Dr. Z was actually in his office, another had figured out where the study guides were on reserve at the library, and we compared notes because some of us had different advisers and we could pool their ideas when putting schedules together.  It certainly would have been do-able without that - we all had some classes without our study people, too, but for students who are already struggling I wondered if it was more overwhelming to be flying solo on more things.  

 

[madteaparty]

17 hours ago, Sneezyone said:

Our district has four options—developmental, academic, honors and AP/DE. Your experience is your own. I really wish you would stop talking as if that’s the public school norm. It’s the norm where YOU live.

By definition it’s the norm where she lives. Just the same for you or me.  Bit rude of a message here, did she touch some sort of nerve or what? 

[madteaparty]

2 hours ago, EKS said:

IMO, one solution is to have an admissions test with an extremely high ceiling.

With regard to the original question--among other things, calculus in high school is being used as a proxy for intelligence.  Of course, it's not the only one.  Another is how much extracurricular stuff a kid does.  If you can get all As in a slate of rigorous courses and also do a bunch of stuff after school, you're probably more intelligent than a student who can't.

The more you get rid of direct measures of intelligence, the more people will rely on these sorts of proxies.  

I agree. It’s being used as some sort of proxy. Everyone needs some documentable gatekeepers I guess. 

[Roadrunner]

3 hours ago, Clemsondana said:

I don't know what is offered there now, but when I was in high school back in the dark ages only a handful of us took AP calc (I don't think any passed - the set-up was that the teacher was teaching something to a class in the front of the classroom while we sat in the back and watched videos of a college prof and then were supposed to do it ourselves without asking questions).  The majority of college bound kids took a non-AP calc class that was more like 'intro to calculus'.  We all would have been better off in it because they actually learned the things that they did cover, making it a decent intro to college calc if they needed it. 

I was talking with a friend who teaches at a major state U - I was asking about APs and DEs for my kid.  She said that a lot of AP doesn't directly translate to anything besides elective credits in most programs.  We were talking with a retired teacher who used to teach AP Human Geography, which is where they stick most college-track kids here.  He said that he doesn't get it - he taught the class, but it's mostly useless since the AP credit isn't good for much of anything.  They tell kids that it's the only rigorous social studies option for freshmen.  I feel like we sometimes push kids to take all sorts of APs for the purpose of being competitive, at the expense of them actually learning anything useful.  My own kid will have some APs and DEs but we're choosing to do that in classes that naturally align with the test and using other classes to explore interesting things.  But, kid has very high scores and some awards and they are not interested in elite schools so they are looking at places with 40+% admission rates so it's a different consideration than if they wanted to to do a very low-admission-rate school.  

 

See, again my kid is taking AP Human Geo. In my state (or maybe it’s my district) geography is a required class and every 9th grader must take it. No exceptions. You have only two options. Either a full year AP Human Geo class (+health class online) or a semester long non AP geography class and a semester long health class. I would say 75% of kids are in AP Human Geo because it is simply a much better class than an alternative. And because it gives them a grade boost. There isn’t any other social studies option for freshman at all. History is reserved for grades 10 and 11, and you can’t even take Econ until you are a senior. Not in our school. 

[regentrude]

35 minutes ago, Clemsondana said:

Things are definitely worse now in many ways, but they've been talking about some growing problems for years.  Learned helplessness is a big one, and I keep thinking about how we worked together to figure things out so we didn't have to ask faculty for help as often. 

Oh yes, we observe this a lot. There is an odd lack of resourcefulness.
On one hand, they can google every little dumb thing, but when it comes to finding information that is clearly spelled out on the course website/Canvas or the university directory, they are too lazy and simply email the professor. I am wondering whether the continuous pressure on faculty to be available and responsive 24/7 hasn't conditioned students to expect us to do the work they can't bebothered to do themselves.

Prime example: "How can I contact my recitation instructor? I could not find their email anywhere." Hm. Have you tried looking it up in the campus directory? (that would require you to actually know their name. You'd either have to have bothered to pay attention - or find it on your schedule of classes)? Did you try looking on the course website or on Canvas in the "Important Course Info" module under "instructor contact information" (who would have thought to look there of all places?)? Did it occur to you you can simply send them directly a message through their Canvas page for their section that you are enrolled in?

THAT has definitely increased over the past years, even before pandemic.

Alternatively, the problem could be that we are admitting students who are lacking the executive function to be successful in college. Or highschool is so mindless that these kids have never had to take any initiative. I don't know the definitive answer, but yes, we are seeing this at a disturbing level.

[Clemsondana]

4 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:

See, again my kid is taking AP Human Geo. In my state (or maybe it’s my district) geography is a required class and every 9th grader must take it. No exceptions. You have only two options. Either a full year AP Human Geo class (+health class online) or a semester long non AP geography class and a semester long health class. I would say 75% of kids are in AP Human Geo because it is simply a much better class than an alternative. And because it gives them a grade boost. There isn’t any other social studies option for freshman at all. History is reserved for grades 10 and 11, and you can’t even take Econ until you are a senior. Not in our school. 

That's similar to what I'm talking about here - huge numbers of kids are taking an AP class as freshmen...which seems like it has to imply that it's not truly a college equivalent class since it seems unlikely that 75% of freshmen at most high schools would be capable of college level work.  It could be a great class without being college-level.  I'm planning what I hope will be a great home-grown world history class for my kid next year, but I don't know that it's the equivalent of a college class.  Looking at the equivalency chart at one of my kid's potential colleges, even a 5 only gets you out of geography 101, which, unless you are majoring in geography, is likely to be an elective.  Since most STEM majors required some upper level classes (so that you need a sequence - psych 201 followed by various 300 level classes, for instance) it actually only helps if you intend to continue in the geography department.  It is fine for what it is, but it's unfortunate that students can graduate thinking 'Yay -I have AP - maybe I can finish college early' only to find that many of the credits don't actually help.  

[Clemsondana]

6 minutes ago, regentrude said:

Oh yes, we observe this a lot. There is an odd lack of resourcefulness.
On one hand, they can google every little dumb thing, but when it comes to finding information that is clearly spelled out on the course website/Canvas or the university directory, they are too lazy and simply email the professor. I am wondering whether the continuous pressure on faculty to be available and responsive 24/7 hasn't conditioned students to expect us to do the work they can't bebothered to do themselves.

 

Friend said that she had to tell the students in the second week 'There are 600 of you spread across several sections.  If you all contact me after every class and I spend 1 minute per email, that is 10 hours, twice a week.  I am happy to help if you need help, but think about whether you need to message me before you hit send.'  Because...there is no way to respond in a timely manner to that many.   I rarely encountered this - my CC students were mostly adults with jobs and kids, and some had combat experience.  They occasionally wrote with a question about content or to notify me of an absence if it coincided with a test so that they could reschedule, but that was it.  With 50ish students, maybe 2 emails a week...I'm sure friend would be happy to respond to 20-30 emails a week, but not hundreds, twice/week.  But, like I said, we always checked with our group first, and contacting the instructor only happened if none of us could figure it out...and then we sent one email and disseminated the info to the group.  

[Arcadia]

21 minutes ago, Roadrunner said:

. I would say 75% of kids are in AP Human Geo because it is simply a much better class than an alternative. And because it gives them a grade boost. 

AP Human Geog can also be used to knock off a gen ed for CSU/UC if the student did well at the exam.

[Arcadia]

4 minutes ago, Clemsondana said:

Friend said that she had to tell the students in the second week 'There are 600 of you spread across several sections.  If you all contact me after every class and I spend 1 minute per email, that is 10 hours, twice a week.  I am happy to help if you need help, but think about whether you need to message me before you hit send.'  

My community college instructors have stated that coursework related questions be posted on the discussion boards so that they do not have to answer the same questions over and over again. Personal issues like asking for deadlines extension or ambiguity over quiz/exam answers is through emails. It also helps that most of us put the correct subject info in the email subject heading.

[regentrude]

22 minutes ago, Arcadia said:

. It also helps that most of us put the correct subject info in the email subject heading.

Oh your lucky instructors!

[Arcadia]

9 minutes ago, regentrude said:

Oh your lucky instructors!

That to me is basic manners. I tell my kids to be kind to the person processing the emails be it for admin stuff or coursework. Making sure our “RE:” when writing letters were taught when I was in school, starting from upper elementary (not in US). 
I have heard some friends who are instructors or admin staff saying some students lack email writing skills. 

[regentrude]

6 minutes ago, Arcadia said:

That to me is basic manners. I tell my kids to be kind to the person processing the emails be it for admin stuff or coursework. Making sure our “RE:” when writing letters were taught when I was in school, starting from upper elementary (not in US). 
I have heard some friends who are instructors or admin staff saying some students lack email writing skills. 

Oh yes. Big time. No subject line. No greeting ("hey" doesn't count). No signature (I am supposed to divine from the email address who sent the email). And don't get me started on addressing female professors by their first name, or as Ms Firstname - something my male colleagues never have to deal with. They get addressed as Dr. Smith or Prof. Smith. 

Edited February 16, 2022 by regentrude

[Clarita]

On 2/15/2022 at 5:42 AM, Sebastian (a lady) said:

And yet, the decision about who gets to study to become and engineer is often based in a math tracking choice made in middle school. That should not be the pivotal moment, imho.

I think the problem with that is an engineering degree often requires 190-200+ units to graduate based on the classes they have to take. Potentially you will need some calculus for your intro courses especially if you are going into a physics heavy engineering major (or at least I can only speak to physics heavy engineering major). 

[Sneezyone]

2 hours ago, madteaparty said:

By definition it’s the norm where she lives. Just the same for you or me.  Bit rude of a message here, did she touch some sort of nerve or what? 

Nerve touched. Having worked in/with public education for decades, there are challenges that I readily acknowledge. The near constant catastrophizing is grating.