# What is the earliest age that calculus is commonly taught? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [February 24, 2012, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-earliest-age-that-calculus-is-commonly-taught/613886 "2012-02-24T22:39:49Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![standingwave](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9de0a6/32.png) [@standingwave](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/standingwave)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 12:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-earliest-age-that-calculus-is-commonly-taught/613886/61 "2012-03-05T00:32:11Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > Curiously, without being particularly good at math, much less an engineer, I always enjoyed word problems and the extra step of analysis they require. I remember taking Philosophy of Logic at the same time I was taking Digital Logic from the EE department. In the philosophy class, we were taking word problems and converting them to [boolean expressions](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boolean_algebra_%28logic%29) and then reducing them. I blew my philosphy professor’s mind when I started using [Karnaugh maps](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map) to reduce the expressions. (I’ despise busy work.) It’s the same way I don’t (nor do many EE’s) use differential equations to solve RLC circuits, but use the [Laplace transform](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laplace_transform) method instead. I say, why reinvent the wheel? Anyway, my philosophy professor was so fascinated he went out and picked up the engineering textbook. ---
**Author:** ![amanset](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8dc957/32.png) [@amanset](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amanset)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 1:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-earliest-age-that-calculus-is-commonly-taught/613886/62 "2012-03-05T13:46:59Z")
> [@pulykamell](#): > > I think I understand what you’re talking about, but you’re going to have to clarify “doing maths” for those of us who don’t know what that means. It means simply “taking a course in Mathematics”. Unlike the US, in the UK it is highly unusual (or at least it was, maybe things have changed over the last decade) to have individual courses in algebra, calculus, trigonometry etc. Instead you’d have a class called “Mathematics” with a syllabus that’s cover the individual bits that there seem to be separate courses for in the US. ---
**Author:** ![amanset](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/8dc957/32.png) [@amanset](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/amanset)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2012, 1:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-earliest-age-that-calculus-is-commonly-taught/613886/63 "2012-03-05T13:56:55Z")
> [@spankthecrumpet](#): > > I think that the usual age in a state (read public in American term) school to bring in calculus is sixteen now, as it is an a level thing. But it used to be in o level. Definitely. Back in the early 90s, when I was doing GCSEs and A-Levels, I remember doing O-Level past papers as the GCSE was reasonably new and so there weren’t many past examinations. All sorts of things regarding functions and calculus, that wouldn’t be taught until the A Level, were in it. Personally I had a fun teacher that taught us basic differentiation at sixteen so as to check our results for manually calculated gradients. Notes for non-Brits: The O-Level (O=Ordinary) was an exam British children took at the age of sixteen. Around 1988 it was replaced with the GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education). It is common to do eight to ten subjects (IIRC - I did nine). The A-Level (A=Advanced) is taken at the age of eighteen. It used to be common to do two to four subjects (I did four) but I seem to hear about more and more children doing five. The decline in difficulty of examinations is a common discussion in the UK. To widespread ridicule, both Labour and Conservative governments have got all excited about how each year more and more people get top grades, yet they insist that the exams have not got easier. They even had to introduce a new top grade, the A\* that is better than an A, for the GCSE as so many people were getting an A. My first year of my Mathematics degree was spent doing a general cover-all course, approximately a third of which I had done in some form before. A lecturer explained this to me by saying that they could not guarantee that everyone will know the same things so they had to spend a year getting everyone up to the same level and then adding new stuff on top of that. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2012, 6:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-earliest-age-that-calculus-is-commonly-taught/613886/64 "2012-03-06T06:08:18Z")
> [@amanset](#): > > The decline in difficulty of examinations is a common discussion in the UK. To widespread ridicule, both Labour and Conservative governments have got all excited about how each year more and more people get top grades, yet they insist that the exams have not got easier. They even had to introduce a new top grade, the A\* that is better than an A, for the GCSE as so many people were getting an A. My first year of my Mathematics degree was spent doing a general cover-all course, approximately a third of which I had done in some form before. A lecturer explained this to me by saying that they could not guarantee that everyone will know the same things so they had to spend a year getting everyone up to the same level and then adding new stuff on top of that. FWIW, when I took the GRE\* exam (twice during the 1990s), the median score in the math section skewed much higher than the median score in the verbal. With 800 being a perfect score in either section, you could reach the upper 600s in math just by reviewing elementary algebra up to and including problems involving two simultaneous linear equations. To do the same in the verbal, by contrast, you pretty much needed a command of the language that was noticeably well above average. \*Graduate Record Examination, for those graduating from four-year colleges planning to attend grad school. Not all graduate programs require applicants to take this test. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [March 6, 2012, 7:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-earliest-age-that-calculus-is-commonly-taught/613886/65 "2012-03-06T07:48:25Z")
> [@amanset](#): > > Unlike the US, in the UK it is highly unusual (or at least it was, maybe things have changed over the last decade) to have individual courses in algebra, calculus, trigonometry etc. Instead you’d have a class called “Mathematics” with a syllabus that’s cover the individual bits that there seem to be separate courses for in the US. That’s how it works in Spain up to college level, the first year I had Calculus was 10th grade and that year’s _Matemáticas_ involved, off the top of my head and I’m sure I’m forgetting stuff: - trigonometical functions per se (as opposed to the more applied trigonometry we’d had from 6th to 8th as part of geometry), - limits, - differential equations (deduced the formulas using limits), - intro to series (only a couple of types, and of course their limits and derivations). [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-is-the-earliest-age-that-calculus-is-commonly-taught/613886.md?page=3)