This is not true. There are not tens of thousands of kids taking calculus as freshman in high school. Please stop. |
The original poster was questioning if they should take any calculus before leaving high school and is aiming for a top college. The juxtaposition is stark...there certainly are thousands of freshmen in high school taking calculus, with close to a 1,000 in the DMV area. This person would be graduating without even taking it. Which applicant would you rather be? Of course they don't "need" to take it. But it certainly isn't going to help them. |
The OP didn’t say anything at all about aiming for a top college. |
1. Show me a single piece of verifiable data supporting the idea that “close to 1,000” freshman in the DMV are taking calculus. 2. This has nothing to do with what type of school OP’s kid wants to go to. It has only to do with you pulling “stats” out of your ass. |
| Community college |
| Talk to the school about dual enrollment at a nearby community college and if that doesn't work as them if she can dual enroll in an online high school or college that would offer what she needs. Make a stink if you have to. |
TJ will have at least a couple of hundred. |
| Definitely find an in-person community college class. My brother spent his mornings at high school and his afternoons taking college classes. |
Another guess pulled out of your ass. Not actual data! |
NP. There were 300K+ AP Calc AB and Calc BC tests that were taken in 2024. You can review and factcheck to whatever level you need to convince yourself. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP_Calculus 1K may be a made up statistic but it's probably a massive undercount. The most advanced students in America are geographically clustered and DMV is one such area. |
Well, to start, you misread the table. 251k students took AP Calc exams in 2024. Your assumption that 1000 of them must have been freshman in the DMV remains ungrounded in... anything. |
| The DMV is overrepresented in students taking calculus... |
I said I was a new poster, not the person who made up the 1K statistic. But why would you think there would be a small number of calculus students in the DMV based on population, local educational attainment, how highly the school districts are ranked nationally, etc? Also the SAT National Merit Finalist index threshold are very high in Maryland at least. Much higher than in flyover country. That speaks to a high level of math training among at least that part of the student body. I did some napkin math that suggests that there should be 6,000+ calculus students in the DC MSA if each AP Calc test represents one student and the share of DMV test takers is proportional to the DC MSA as a % of total pop. Feel free to do your own math. |
| There are definitely a lot of DMV students who take multi/Linear/Diff by the time they leave high school. It isn't unreasonable to believe that many are starting as freshmen in Calculus. There was a Harvard survey that showed 25% of the entering class had calculus beyond calc BC. |
| Could she join together with classmates in the same situation to do an online class? Watch the lectures today, then sit down together and do the problem sets? |