High school math and admissions
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Anonymous
| Calc isn’t just for stem but for the social sciences. |
Anonymous
But Stats is so much more useful for most kids. And that’s frustrating. For many kids, saying, you want to go to a good college, take Calc not Stats is essentially saying you should do something pointless but hard for sake of saying you did something hard. Of course the world needs a certain number of people who understand Calculus. But the this country needs everyone to have a basic understanding of stats. It’s fundamental to accurately assessing risks and not be the moron who keeps insisting the polls were wrong in 2016 because they showed HRC with a 70% chance of winning. I’m a lawyer and I constantly draw on high school stats. I haven’t used Calculus since I left high school. My college kid in geophysics an Engineer DN needs calculus OTOH. My humanities kid just doesn’t. But will take it to check a college box. And when she says it’s pointless— she’s right. She’s really want to go to college in Canada or Great Britain, but with COVID, she also has to apply in the US. Canada and Great Britain do not care if their Arts students have Calculus. You need enough math to hit the SAT cutoff. They care a lot about how your metrics in the program you are applying for. And it’s so sensible. We really need to overhaul what we consider fundamental in education. But that’s a different post. Team Stats. It’s not how a lot of colleges see it though. |
Anonymous
Stats isn't necessary for STEM. Look at all these public health "experts" talking about COVID cases instead of underlying infection rates and positivity rates without discussing sample selection issues. 
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Anonymous
| But do they need AP Calc to check the box? Or is Calc with applications in 11th and AP Stats in 12th ok? |
Anonymous
| If you are applying to Michigan, Chapel Hill, UTexas, you are going to need AP Calc. It just looks bad to not have taken it when schools offer AB and BC. But if you are step below (but still amazing school like Maryland, Ohio State, Florida) you can get away with AP Stat which is way more useful. |
Anonymous
I know a kid who got into UMich OOS with alg 2 as a junior and reg stat as a senior. However he had a 1520 sat, district and state sport accomplishments and was class president. School offered AB but not BC. |
Anonymous
| My kid got into a top SLAC with Calc with applications. The problem was he needed to take math at the college and didn’t place well. There was no equivalent and the college wouldn’t just allow him to take Calc I like he hoped. It was a disaster. |
Anonymous
Do you mean skip Calc I? He didn’t even place into Calc I as a freshman? |
Anonymous
He is interested in SLACs not any of those schools though. |
Anonymous
What top SLACs require math? |
Anonymous
Math is one of the liberal arts. |
Anonymous
Amherst, Williams, Colby, etc are even more difficult to get into than top flagships. |
Anonymous
| Just expressing some frustration with this very thing - I went to MIT and work in STEM but even I think stats is way, way more useful than calculus - even to kids going into some sciences where you don't need differential equations, etc. Stats would be the more useful class for 90% of kids and specifically is a good intro to the concepts that get taught in a lot of first year biology, chem and social sciences classes, and is crucial to folks who will do a lot of data analytics in their work in the future - which in the next 20 years will be basically most educated people. Literally every day I hear scientifically educated folks get things wrong because they never learned stats in a concentrated way, but instead kind of osmosed stats through their science coursework. So if kids are involved in science at all, do calc instead in HS because it's still considered the gold standard in college admissions and I do think you are at a disadvantage if you don't have it - it's a stupid legacy thing, but it's true. But if your kid is a social science kid or humanities and your goal is to give them a good foundation for college I would say a good year of stats in high school will be more valuable to them doing well in those first year science/social science classes. If you need to take calculus to graduate and that's going to be your terminal math class, just take it through community college and go on with your life. |
Anonymous
| My kid took Pre-Calc as a senior (Private School thought he should be on a slower track for math). Ended up getting 750 on the Math portion of the LSAT. No problem getting into a number of very competitive schools. Different paths for different kids - for a great HS experience, find courses that are enough of a challenge to be interesting, but where they can also get an A. I hate that I say that, but what some parents do not realize is how much top schools look at class rank and compare you to peers. US News does not care about what classes you take - they want the high GPAs and AP 5s. |
Anonymous
| Whether stat is "useful" in practice is irrelevant in college admissions. College is assessing whether you have taken a rigorous course load. AP stat at HS level is not a difficult class. AP Calc BC is. If you want to apply to competitive schools you need Calc BC on your transcript. |