What proportion of American high schools teach any calculus courses? What proportion of American high schools teach any A.P. (advanced placement0 courses? What proportion of American high schools teach any I.B. (international baccalaureate) courses? What proportion of American high schools teach either A.P. or I.B. courses? I’m sure you have amusing anecdotes about the calculus, A.P., or I.B. courses that you have taken or taught, but that doesn’t really help me answer these questions. Really, all I need are the statistics I’m asking for.
According to the College Board at Supporting Students from Day One to Exam Day – AP Central | College Board, nearly 60% of U.S. high schools participate in the A.P. program.
There are about 40,000 high schools in the U.S. Of these, 683 offer at least one IB program. Total participation: About 1.7%.
Thanks for the answers, stochastic and MikeS. Can anyone tell me now what proportion of American high schools teach any calculus course?
That one may be tough. My high school didn’t have a Calculus course, per se, but had a course called Math V that included some Calculus.
Side question: what exactly is an IB program, and how does it differ from other advanced classes AP programs?
From the IBO website search function, there are only 521 U.S. high schools that offer the diploma program, which is what I think WW is asking about. The total number of U.S. high schools is around 24,000 or 25,000 for a proportion of around two percent.
I have no idea, but I just wanted to point out that high schools that don’t teach their own Calculus courses might still make arrangements for students who wanted/needed to to take Calculus elsewhere (like at a neighboring community college).
FYI, I don’t know why you’re looking for the info, but at least when I graduated high school, for AP classes there was no actual requirement to take the corresponding AP class in order to take the exam. For example, I couldn’t fit AP English into my schedule, but still took the exam and got 2 semesters of college English credit for it.
The Dept. of Education website I linked above says that there’s about this number of public high schools; I was counting private high schools as well.
Man, I thought all schools did that. I had no idea that so few actually do.
I’m lucky I went to an AP school. They were the only classes that seem to me in retrospect to have been worth anything, esp. given my present pursuits.
-Kris
My high school had you attend the local juco. That was in the 70’s.
Here in Ohio, most high schools, even small ones, offer calculus. They don’t necessarily do so as part of the AP program. And, in Ohio, you can go to college to take courses paid for by your local school system before you graduate from high school, so that option is open as well.
The question should have been how many high schools pretend to teach calculus. It is easy to answer the question how many do teach it: none.
About 25% of McGill’s students are American and a goodly number of them come in with AP calculus and so we have two calc I courses, one for students who had AP calculus and one for those who didn’t. The two courses have exactly the same sylabus and exactly the same three hour of lectures per week. The only difference is that the one for AP survivors has one tutorial (recitation) a week and the other has two of them.
In fact, I would rather begin with the virgin class since they don’t come in believing they already know it and don’t have to do any work. What they actually learned was a few cookbook tricks, but very little actual mathematics.
My small high school in Ohio didn’t offer calculus. It didn’t offer to help you take calculus at a local junior college. It didn’t offer A.P. courses, and I didn’t even hear of A.P. courses or tests until I was out of high school, I think. Granted, this was a long time ago. If we get into a discussion of whether the calculus or A.P. courses in high school are any good, it’s going to be a long hijack, so let’s not. All I want to know is what proportion of American high schools offer a course that they call calculus.
According to this: http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind06/c1/c1h.htm#c1hl2
More specifically, Appendix 1-15 (http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind06/append/c1/at01-15.pdf) shows that 92.8 percent of high school students in 2000 attended schools that offered a calculus course, and 76.7 percent attended schools that offered AP or IB calculus).
Thanks, Gfactor. Actually, I think you misread a digit. It’s 92.6%, not 92.8%.
Sorry. Typo. You can probably find more statistics like that on the National Center For Educations Statistics website: http://nces.ed.gov/
I poked around a bit and didn’t find anything, but I ran out of time (work and all).
For the record, my high school had a calculus class, which I took and managed to barely pass, in the mid-80s. I don’t think they had any AP or IB math, but I seem to recall the juco option being available.
I briefly attended this private school, which had IB stuff.
At least one does. I had a fantastic AP calculus teacher, got a 5 on the BC test, passed out of college calc I & II (directly into vector calculus). I actually became a math major because I was so inspired by my high school calc teacher. It was easily the best class I ever had at any level. And I still remember how to do everything I learned in it… unlike most of the college math courses I took.