how difficult is AP stats?

[Anonymous]

How difficult is AP stats? Is it a lot of work?
My kid has a blank in his schedule and is considering adding in another AP.
He's at a private school so the options are limited.


Thank you!

[Anonymous]

One of the easiest AP course for good students.

[Anonymous]

Whatever you do, no AP Calc BC. My senior flamed out, even though he's good in math.

[Anonymous]

Reasonable. Not a piece of cake for my student, but manageable.

[Anonymous]

Stats, Environmental Science and Psych are probably the easiest of the AP classes. Stats is also extremely useful for many college majors, and is likely to get them out of a stats requirement in college.

[Anonymous]

I’ve heard stats is fairly easy and not as much work as the reading intensive classes. APES is a ton work at our school and the grades are bad. AP Lang has been way easier.

[Anonymous]

Depends on the kid, the work ethic, and their reading skills. I joke that stats is only 25% math, the rest is reading/writing/logic. A lot of the problems don’t have a single variable/number in them—they are completely conceptual.

It’s not rocket science but it’s definitely not a class you can BS your way through. Your child has to be willing to read a lot and write decently well.

A kid who had an easy time in calc will find stats easy. A kid coming from algebra II who needed a tutor will really struggle—and there aren’t really any tutors available for the course. Most math teachers won’t touch stats.

AP stats teacher

[Anonymous]

Very easy for any typical AP student.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Very easy for any typical AP student.

+1

[Anonymous]

Look up the % of exam with 5, 4 or 3 online.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Whatever you do, no AP Calc BC. My senior flamed out, even though he's good in math.

I wouldn't say no AP calc Bc. However, I highly recommend you do Calc AB first. My kid struggled with BC simply because the teacher makes it extremely hard to prepare the kids for the AP test. IN her 10+ years of teaching BC (and 30-50 students each year), she has over 99.9% earning 4s or 5s and over 75% earning 5s. So who cares that my kid got their first B- ever fall senior year. They earned a 5 on the AP test, started in Calc 3 and earned a B+ at good school (and considering my kid was sick half of fall freshman year and had a difficult adjustment to college, I'd say an A- was awesome---they were extremely sick the day of the first midterm and hadn't been sleeping due to an ear infection so needless to say the grade was bad and they pulled their way back from a 45% to get an A- in the class without a curve. ).

AP stats is significantly easier and I highly recommend taking it. Almost every major will benefit from stats---STEm as well as the humanities and social sciences will use stats. AP stats is not-calc based but will prep your kid well for the future if they need a calc based stats class for their major.

[Anonymous]

It’s pretty easy for a good math student. My daughter’s school teaches it as a half class (the have a block schedule) so it’s clearly less material/easier to get through than other math APs. She took it concurrently with multivariable calc and was not overloaded.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Whatever you do, no AP Calc BC. My senior flamed out, even though he's good in math.

I wouldn't say no AP calc Bc. However, I highly recommend you do Calc AB first. My kid struggled with BC simply because the teacher makes it extremely hard to prepare the kids for the AP test. IN her 10+ years of teaching BC (and 30-50 students each year), she has over 99.9% earning 4s or 5s and over 75% earning 5s. So who cares that my kid got their first B- ever fall senior year. They earned a 5 on the AP test, started in Calc 3 and earned a B+ at good school (and considering my kid was sick half of fall freshman year and had a difficult adjustment to college, I'd say an A- was awesome---they were extremely sick the day of the first midterm and hadn't been sleeping due to an ear infection so needless to say the grade was bad and they pulled their way back from a 45% to get an A- in the class without a curve. ).

AP stats is significantly easier and I highly recommend taking it. Almost every major will benefit from stats---STEm as well as the humanities and social sciences will use stats. AP stats is not-calc based but will prep your kid well for the future if they need a calc based stats class for their major.

+1. BC is needed if you are applying to tech majors in top schools. Those institutions want to see the student take the most rigorous courses available to him or her in college

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Reasonable. Not a piece of cake for my student, but manageable.

Agreed. I'll add that it actually a useful course. Understanding of stats can be applied to multiple majors. Both my kids were glad they took it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Whatever you do, no AP Calc BC. My senior flamed out, even though he's good in math.

I wouldn't say no AP calc Bc. However, I highly recommend you do Calc AB first. My kid struggled with BC simply because the teacher makes it extremely hard to prepare the kids for the AP test. IN her 10+ years of teaching BC (and 30-50 students each year), she has over 99.9% earning 4s or 5s and over 75% earning 5s. So who cares that my kid got their first B- ever fall senior year. They earned a 5 on the AP test, started in Calc 3 and earned a B+ at good school (and considering my kid was sick half of fall freshman year and had a difficult adjustment to college, I'd say an A- was awesome---they were extremely sick the day of the first midterm and hadn't been sleeping due to an ear infection so needless to say the grade was bad and they pulled their way back from a 45% to get an A- in the class without a curve. ).

AP stats is significantly easier and I highly recommend taking it. Almost every major will benefit from stats---STEm as well as the humanities and social sciences will use stats. AP stats is not-calc based but will prep your kid well for the future if they need a calc based stats class for their major.

+1. BC is needed if you are applying to tech majors in top schools. Those institutions want to see the student take the most rigorous courses available to him or her in college

Our HS does AB first then BC (I'm the PP). My kid had no issues with AB---easily had a 99%. BC was much harder after the first month. But with hard work they earned a 5 and getting a B+ in Calc 3 tells me they learned the material (especially since there was no curve in Calc 3 since over 50% of the class had taken MVC in HS, but had to retake in college to get credit---whereas typical calc 3 courses have a curve, heck most college math courses do) My kid took AP stats senior year as well and found it incredibly easy. It will be excellent prep for the Calc based stats course required for their engineering major.