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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I went to high school in a state with a traditional math curriculum, but I went to college at an engineering school in New York state, so my classmates were mostly from New York State public schools which offered an integrated math curriculum.

From years of study groups and my now DH, I have a strong impression that the integrated curriculum was a whole lot weaker and less rigorous than what I learned, but also that the students who had taken a mixed up curriculum had no idea what they knew and didn't know. [b]They couldn't identify something as algebra, statistics, trigonometry, geometry, or any particular type of math. [/b]They knew lots of random bits of stuff without knowing how it fit together or how it built on itself. Given that experience, I have a strong preference for a curriculum that builds linearly instead of jumping all over the place at random.[/quote]

This is definitely true for me and how I learned math in the UK - I didn’t really know what anything was called. But the math in my math A Level (the exam taken at age 18) was generally much harder than the math I see in high school here, except for calculus which there seems to be much more of.[/quote]
There's not really a standard level of math coming out of US high schools.  The tops students will have taken Calc 3 and Differential Equations, so a full two years of college math.  Struggling math students may have taken "Algebra concepts" and classes titled something like "math for every day".   That's a huge span.[/quote]

This.

People that are new to math education in US are misinformed and rehash cliches of how bad the system is. The truth is there’s a huge variation and the system allows for the very top students to go very far up to second year of undergrad through community colleges. That’s impossible in other countries with a more uniform and rigid educational framework.

I’ll take the US system any day and I’m coming from a country that did the integrated route.[/quote]

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