I Hate Pre-calc!!!!!

So, I took pre-calc Junior year in High School. Got a B+. Took Calculus in High School. Got an A-. Get to college, take a placement test, didn’t do well enough, and have to take pre-calc… again. This was last term. Take pre-calc in college… FAILED!!! What the fuck! I got a 67%, but it takes a 70% to pass here. ARGH!!! What is it about it that makes me fail this time? I don’t know! Can’t explain it. I can find the area under a curve, I can do derivitives, but I can’t do pre-calc. So, I have to take pre-calc again, and am now 2 semesters behind most of my freinds in math. <Sigh> Off I go to class now…

Maybe you fooled yourself into thinking you remembered more than you really did, and didn’t study enough. I’ve done that.

There’s a simple rule for surviving in college…

Don’t skip classes.

You (or maybe your parents) are shelling out a buttload of money. Go to every class, pay attention, study your butt off, and get your freaking money’s worth out of it.

I agree with sturm - since you did OK in high school, I imagine you’re taking college too easily. That’s not a-gonna work.

Also, don’t forget to talk to the professor! Even more so if it’s a case where you do well with the homework, feel you know the material, and the tests come out of left field. (The ‘What the fuck is this shit?’ syndrome. Not pretty.)

Don’t forget to look at those tests carefully. Where are you loosing the points? Simple careless mistakes? Big concepts?

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<< Foo! >>

I wonder if it would be better to take it over the summer at a community college. My local community college did a better job of teaching undergrad math when I was going to school than the state university’s math department, mainly because the class size was smaller and the faculty wasn’t preoccupied by research work.

If it helps, I dropped out of the pre-physics classes but made A’s in physics when I just crashed the courses (not enough math in pre-physics and yes, it was a disorganized department.) I also made A’s throughout calc but only passed diff eq’s by doing every assigned math problem, whether it was to be graded or not. In any case, good luck.

Pre-calc is a beach party compared to diff. eq’s (AKA Calc IV.) Just wanted you to know what you have to look forward to.

Maybe the college course is more rigorous.

I sailed through Calculus in HS. I placed into second quarter Calculus in college, and found myself over my head. The problem was that the College course was based on precise definitions and proofs of formulas. We hadn’t done that in HS, and I didn’t know how to do it.

With help from the instructor, I was able to learn the stuff that I had missed out on. Once I caught on, I was OK.

Diff Eq’s is second only to Advanced Solid State Physics as the hardest math class I have had.

FUCK YOU PARTIAL FRACTIONS!! AND FUCK YOU LAPLACE YOU COCKSUCKER!!

Oh yeah, BTW. I just wanted to add that I HIGHLY suggest that you seriously pay attention in pre-Calc. Namely Trig. Most people forget Trig after the class ends, but dont do it.

You laugh now, but once you hit Junior/Senior year in any engineering program you will need to pull out all those trig identitites that you drank away freshman year.

Life sucks hard when you are teaching yourself Trig over again and trying to learn Adv. Eng. Mathematics at the same time.

High School <> College.

High School is, more often than not, a joke compared to college. In fact, if you want to drive a college professor up the wall, complain that you got a higher grade in the subject in high school. They don’t care, and they don’t have a reason to care - college is (usually) abou tlearning, whereas high school is about babysitting. It’s tough, I know. I remember the first college prof who wouldn’t accept the crap I used to turn in for English papers. He kicked my sorry ass to the curb and by god I learned how to write a real paper, not a high school one.

On that note the community college idea isn’t bad. In a big college your undergrad courses are usually taught by grad students who may have a very good knowledge of the material but might not have been teaching for very long to really know how to present it most effectively. And don’t be above getting a tutor.

If you plan to go on in math don’t slack off on the basics. Too many people decide to screw around in Algebra, pre-calc, and trig, don’t get the foundations, and then don’t stand a chance in the later classes.

most people hated pre-calc in my precalc class. we had a very demanding professor and most people dropped out.

but it was for the best.

if you ended up passing her class, you learned your shit. i can still draw a unit circle with degree/radian and xy values at 16 or so major points. and yes, this is incredibly useful, because in my calculus classes, about 80% of the time (get this) ** we can’t use any calculators at all **. yes, right from the stone age, we are (according to almost everyone else i know who’ve taken calc at other universities).

i’m in comp sci (among others), so i’ve had pre-calc, calc 1,2,3, discrete mathematics, going to have to take differential equations and another math elective. if i take an extra math on top of that, i’ll have a math minor, so i’m going to do that.

so buckle down and study that shit. you** will **need it in your higher math classes. if you’ve had trouble, then take the class very seriously. don’t skip, study daily, go to the prof if you need help. that’s how you’ll pass the class. good luck.

You know, for all the people here who’re talking about “needing this in higher levels of math,” I respectfully point out that not everybody in college (or at least the college that I go to) takes higher level math courses. If I’d placed into pre-calc here, I would’ve taken in–and that would’ve been it. With my current majors (English and Humanities), I wouldn’t have needed another math class; even if I decided to get my math/science requirements using only math, I would’ve only gotten through second semester calc.

Of course, I had to think I wanted to major in psych and sign up for the statistics course, in which I did the exact same thing as Chekmate.*

Word of the wise, dude–don’t skip class just because you think you know the material. Been there, done that in stats, and it hasn’t exactly been fun. Of course, to be fair, my AP Stats credit SHOULD have counted for the course. But it didn’t. Yes, I know the material well enough to get a B. Should’ve gone to class and gotten an A, though.

*[sub]To my credit, I do take notes from the book and my teacher’s notes are on file in the library. I make a point of studying the hell out of those. I also attend EVERY quiz, turn in EVERY assignment on time, and make a point of using every resource that the professor makes available to us. Just because I am not attending the class of a teacher who, through no fault of his own, induces narcolepsy in this student does not mean that I am NOT putting effort into the class. Still should’ve gone to class, though.[/sub]

Though in my experience, if we’re only talking about those who did well in high school math (i.e., at least reached Trig and Calc ), we find that quite a lot of those, maybe most, do go on to higher math in college. At least, they’re more likely to consider technical or scientific majors.

Checkmate, you know how they say, “You’ll never lie on your deathbed and wish you’d spent more time at the office”.
College is just about the opposite. What you do and how you do it has such a tremendous impact on the rest of your life you could rewrite that quote, "You’ll never lie on your deathbed and wish you’d studied less!! Because that’s what you’re really there for.

My advice:

If you’re in a major that doesn’t require calc…

DON"T TAKE CALC IN COLLEGE!

There is no reason to subject yourself to a year of pain and suffering cramming calc into your brain if you don’t need to.

My frosh year in college I kept taking math courses because I always had. I eeked out two C’s in calc 1 and 2 and by calc 3 all I was good for was skipping class. 4 space manipulations are far beyond my talents.

And I was a bio major… I would have been better off taking 2 terms of stats or a term of stats… or more english courses than I was taking calc.

I used to teach college mathematics (and 2 years teaching high school so I can compare) and was all set to give a lecture, then saw Legomancer beat me to it:


High School <> College.

High School is, more often than not, a joke compared to college. In fact, if you want to drive a college professor up the wall, complain that you got a higher grade in the subject in high school. They don’t care, and they don’t have a reason to care - college is (usually) abou tlearning, whereas high school is about babysitting.

I can’t tell you how many times I would have terrible grade students say “I was a 4.0 in high school!” or “I was 3rd in my class!” I had a fellow prof actually ask if her class size was three. The implication of students saying these things are that they are supposed to get high grades and, if they don’t, it must be the professors fault.

What you need to remember is that if a student fails in high school, it is the teachers fault. Note that this may not be true but that is the work atmosphere. Therefore, teachers will be much, much more lenient in their grading because if their students do well, they are a good teacher. If their students don’t do well, they are a bad teacher.

If a student fails in college, it is the students fault. The prof is more interested in grading what you know, on a much tougher standard, then in giving good grades. I’ve some times failed more than half my class and it was never given as a reflection on my teaching ability.

The rule of thumb I’ve heard many times is that, to get an A, you need to spend 2 hours out of class studying for every hour in class. In reality, one to one does well by many students but most need the two to one. This is asked of students where, the previous year in high school, that 5 minutes per hour was considered heavy studying!

Another challenge is that students are enjoying much more personal freedom than ever before with many, many distractions. This occurs right at the time they need to buckle down.

I would see many new Freshman come in and goof off, listening to upper classmates. The problem is that these upper classmates are survivors, and the dead are not seen having dropped out. These new Frosh are deadmeat. When I taught Freshman mathematics courses during the Fall semester, I would give a test the second week. Students would walk in, horrified, coming to their first class having skipped the previous week. I did this because I hated having my class littered with deadmeat. They whine and complain, get low grades and waste my time. If they drop before two weeks then others can add the class and the courses usually were closed.

Ahh, the stories…

:frowning:
I feel your pain brother.

I’ll be doing this summer, because do to my goofing off in 6th and 7th grade, and ridiculous state laws, I have been stuck in the regular track for math, which I’ve been sailing though. This way I’ll get to take AB Calc in my senior year. Now, I’d like to be a physicist, but I don’t know if I have what it takes. If not, engineer it is (maybe.)

I reached AP Calc and AP Stats (Calc 2 was not offered at my school, so I took Stats my senior year). I chose to major in English because I love it. I kind of resent the implication that smarter people automatically gravitate towards technical/scientific majors, since I’m pretty good at math and am STILL an English major. ::shrugs:: I think I’m just oversensitive on the topic, though, ever since someone told me English was an “easy” major. Um, yeah try having three papers due at the end of the semester and knowing that you have to be COHERENT in each of them.

Anyway…

On the topic of studying–I have this horrible way of making people think that I’m not studying when I actually am. For instance, my roommate is convinced that I spend all my time on the computer, and don’t even THINK about my papers until the night before they’re due. Ri-ight. That’s why my books are next to my computer and Word is always open.

I think a lot of frosh come in thinking that, since they’re only going to be in class for a fraction of the time that they were in high school, their coursework will be proportionally easier. It’s a natural deduction, and one that I think many high schools and colleges don’t do enough to correct this. They often leave it up to the teachers, thus allowing some students to crash for a semester when they otherwise wouldn’t have to.

I saw it happen in high school, too; people aren’t ready for the sudden jump in difficulty.

Incidentally, I find college easier that high school. I think this is because, my senior year of high school, I took 5 AP classes. That pretty much worked out to 25 credit hours of college level work IN ADDITION to the work which I did for my non AP classes. Since overload here is more than 17…yeah. But I’m willing to bet this isn’t so in most cases.

And this English major apologizes profusely for her horrible grammar. It’s late :rolleyes:

AotL - I think the assumption that the OP intended to go on in math was due to the statement, “I have to take pre-calc again, and am now 2 semesters behind most of my freinds in math.” While it’s true that most students in college pre-calc aren’t going to be math, engineering, or physics majors (at least, most of mine weren’t), I figure Chekmate intends, or intended, to go that route.