I have a month to learn college algebra

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I don’t want to bore you all with my life story, but the short-short version is like this:

I was really good at math until middle school. I’m still great at arithmetic. Around 7th grade, though, I got bored with my advanced math class and quit paying attention and quit trying. I tested out of all my high school maths (by the skin of my teeth) and never looked back. Now I’m a non-traditional college student and I’ve avoided math long enough that it’s about to screw me over. I only have one semester left before I get my AA degree and transfer to university IF I can test past college algebra into (the ironically easier) MAT142 . . .

. . . if not, I have 3 semesters left.

I’ll be 27 in two weeks so I really don’t have time to waste a year of my life on this shit.

Here’s the description of the course I need to test past:

I’m good at arithmetic and I don’t really remember pre-algebra but I’d pick it up very quickly with a refresher, but I haven’t had a new math class in 15 years. Can I learn this in a week? What do I need to do to prepare myself?

I met with an academic advisor today and we went over all my options. There’s really no way around it - I have to test into this class or I’m screwed out of 2 semesters of my time.

2

Of course, a lot of this is gobbledygook…fancified names for things that you already know or can intuit. Middle school means you were 12 or 13 last time you engaged in math seriously. To answer your question, you probably need at least least a decent tutor to guide you through it. At most, it’s hard to say how far they carry the concepts and with only a week, you may be screwed.

3

Go here and run through the tutorials. They’re quick and to the point. Do the practice things at the bottom. If you need to refresh on the high school stuff a little there’s a link on the left for Virtual Math Lab. This will take you back to intermediate and beginning algebra tutorials.
WT A&M

4

Why not just learn math? Yeah it might take longer until you graduate, but that is your fault for slacking, no?

I don’t quite get why you’d voluntarily want to limit your knowledge.

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Cisco: To learn college algebra (the specific topics listed) in a week for someone who has only arithmetic skills is very ambitious. With effort, you may master the basic algebra skills, but “functions” will kill you if you’ve never work with them before. I think that it will be challenging, but a lot more reasonable, for you to learn it all over a semester because of the long gap since your last math class. OTOH if you have a great aptitude for math (it’s not shit BTW), maybe you can do it. FWIW I’ve taught this subject matter many times to lots of students of varying backgrounds.

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If you don’t know your algebra well, you’ll struggle in whatever other math classes you have to take. Spend some time and do it right.

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What is your ultimate goal? Unless it’s something tremendously verbal, like foreign language translation, I’d really encourage you to take some math in college. Your major may also require a quantitative methods class that assumes some math background, and without it that type of class will be really painful. College-level math skills are IMHO one of the most valuable things you can take away from a college education.

That said, I will point you to one resource that might help you, in conjunction with the tutorials mentioned above. This link is to the math prep guide for the GRE
http://www.ets.org/Media/Tests/GRE/pdf/GREmathPractice.pdf

Now, the test you will be taking will not in any way resemble the quantitative portion of the GRE, I’m sure. So don’t look at a GRE quantitative practice test or prep guide. But this specific guide I linked to really reviews the underlying concepts, which seem to match the concepts on your list pretty closely. I speak from experience that it is something an adult can get through in a weekend. OTOH, I had studied the material before, just long ago.

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What a splendid idea! Why, I think I’ll try to do just that, by jove. At a rapid pace, even.

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Well, as the saying goes, if I were going there, I wouldn’t start from here. But hey, it can’t hurt for you to give the 'tude to everyone who tells you so, can it?

What you’re describing is in no way a week’s worth for anyone without at least a really good grasp of algebra. I’m acing my Open University course in Pure Maths at the moment and even I wouldn’t try to do in a week the equivalent of what you’re describing.

You’ve shirked the math up to now and still dismiss it as shit you don’t have time for. If you need it, better make time for it. There isn’t an alternative.

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I managed to pass all the algebra prereqs to be able to take algebra with a week of self study - and passed easily. But it was the prereqs - fractions and exponents, not logs and functions - the arithmetic you are already good at. And I’d just finished spending a month in Stats training for work, so I’d had a recent math class. I couldn’t have done the algebra, but maybe you are more gifted than I am.

Algebra I spend a semester sitting in class for, doing two to three hours of homework every week for seventeen weeks to cover the material you are covering, and while I did get an A for the class, it did take doing two hours of homework and three hours of classtime every week for seventeen weeks.

(Now, my subsequent stats course I should have passed out of - the great skill I learned there was how to use the calculator to do the calcuations I had been doing in Minitab.

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This is the part that doesn’t make sense to me. So what if you graduate later than you thought you would? I personally didn’t even START college until I was 29. And much as you are doing now, I put off taking my college math classes until just about the end. Silly and short-sighted really, they would have helped me a lot in my science lectures and labs. Plus I found out that I am quite good at algebra and stats and even computer science math–I may not love them, but I’m really good at them. However, to have the slightest idea of what I was doing took practice. Which in turn takes time, more than a week.

Just wish you wouldn’t think that somehow it’s a waste of your life to learn the stuff and gasp maybe be a bit older when you graduate.

even preview doesn’t always help

12

I’m 41 and just graduated last winter. But this sentence reminds me of a girl in my class. She’d gone to school for however long it took her to get her B.S. in Accounting - having not taken algebra (which was a prereq for most of her Accounting courses). She’d taken it a long time ago in high school and could pass out. Well, she didn’t manage to pass out. So her last semester - which in the program tended to be a pretty difficult semester - she was taking Algebra on top of Tax and her Capstone (or maybe it was Audit and Tax) while working full time.

Algebra turned out to be a LOT harder than she thought it would be, and she passed by the skin of her teeth. By doing what she needed to to get by in her other two courses and with a raging case of Senioritis (which didn’t help at all). It was neither a fun semester for her, nor one that improved her GPA. This was someone with a 3.0 in math heavy Accounting coursework.

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It’s personal, really. Fodder for another thread.

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In my humble opinion (B.S. in Mathematics) - no you won’t be able to learn this in a week. What do you need to be able to do to pass the test? 60% or better? If you focus on all the elementary questions and skip anything you don’t understand, you might be able to squeak through. But if if you were barely able to succeed in a test allowing you to pass high school mathematics, I wouldn’t bet on your chances of being able to fake enough knowledge to fool the test for a more advanced level.

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It’s a placement test, so the questions get progressively harder. When you start getting a certain percentage of them wrong, the test ends and they tell you which math to register for.

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From what I remember, college algebra is one of the most failed classes on the college campus where I went to school. The major reason is that the put two semesters worth of math concepts into one 3 credit hour class over one semester; if you didn’t do your homework and all the extra practice work religiously over the course of the semester, you weren’t likely to pass the class. I suggest that you prepare yourself for the test, but acknowledge the fact that you may not come anywhere close to passing the test and will have to take the extra semesters of math.

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Math tutor checking in.

It’s nearly impossible to grasp all that in a week. You have to have a decent understanding of elementary algebra to tackle intermediate algebra.

What exactly is the required class that you would have to take if you pass the placement exam?

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I think you would need to do lots and lots of practice problems. That is the problem with just studying from the textbook and nothing else, you don’t actually have the answers to the end-of-chapter problems. I’m sure a nearby bookstore will have some algebra-review practice books that will have problems and solutions. I know Shaum’s Outlines is one good series, and I see they have a ‘College Algebra’ title. The links given here also look very useful.

But I do agree with the overall sentiment, it sounds like this is a lot to learn in a week. But perhaps if you can get a near miss then someone will be willing work with you – let you take the 122 and 142 classes concurrently or some such.

19

I was coming in here to mention this. A lot of people get into trouble in their algebra classes because they don’t realize that algebra isn’t just about learning the basic concepts; you have to practice them, too. Lots and lots of practice is the key.

What separates the great mathematicians from the good and the good from the abysmal isn’t natural skill, although that does make a difference once you get into very advanced math. They’re separated by experience and practice. You can’t just read about logarithms and then go out and pass a test. You have to do dozens of practice problems, working your way up from simple logs to those huge-assed problems at the very end of the chapter that throw the math beginner into despair at first glance, and then, hopefully, you know logarithms.

Likewise, the quadratic formula itself isn’t that complicated, but believe me, it’s not just about memorizing the quadratic formula. You have to do lots and lots and lots and lots of examples before you stop making simple mistakes like forgetting the fact that the right side of the equation starts off with negative b. Or screwing up the signs underneath the square root. Or forgetting to divide the numerator which you just spent three minutes calculating and rechecking by 2a. Once again, we’re talking dozens of problems before you learn to do it right. And the QF is one of the simpler concepts of algebra. Some of the stuff you’ve listed goes way beyond that.

It’s the same with every single concept you’ve listed. Algebra isn’t quantum physics. You don’t have to be brilliant to get it. You just have to be patient, hard-working, and disciplined, and it helps if you’re not in a rush.

Another thing to remember about higher math is that it’s progressive. You can’t study applications of quadratic equations (I assume they’re talking about word problems) until you can do them on paper, for example. Once again, it’s a lot of work, and it’s not all about theory.

I’m quite sure you can learn the abstract theory behind the concepts you’ve listed within a week. I doubt that you’ll get a passing grade much less a good grade, however, and you don’t have a prayer of actually understanding the material unless you spend day after day and hour after hour doing the practice problems. That’s what will make or break you in algebra, not learning the theory, or even natural talent.

If you don’t want to take college algebra in class, buy yourself a decent algebra textbook and teach yourself. If you wind up taking the class, do yourself a big favor and (a)Solve all the problems in the back of the book, not just the ones your teacher assigns and (b)Do your best to work ahead. Many of the kids who ace higher math do so by having at least a basic understanding of the material before they show up to lecture.

However it goes, I wish you luck. Math is interesting, important, and fun, but one thing it is *not * is simple. :slight_smile:

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Is it CLEP? If it is, pay $20 for three sample tests from Peterson’s. Helped me pass Macroeconomics with flying colors…