Steve on making it to high school calculus

Here's Steve, responding to Myrtle's comment about set theory:

I remember this when I was growing up. Every year we got a bit of set theory. Now, everyone thinks of "sets" when the old New Math is brought up. However, it did cover a lot of math and required a lot of mastery. With a rigorous course in algebra in 8th grade, I made it to the calculus (pre AP days) track in high school without ANY outside help. You can't do this nowadays. This doesn't mean that there were no problems back then, but at least there was a proper path.

I've been trying to find out whether any kids in Irvington make it to calculus without outside help.

So far I haven't found anyone. The 3 recent graduates with whom I've been in contact all had parents who knew math extremely well. In two cases the parents were employed in math fields. Those parents were actively engaged in their kids' math education. "Actively involved" as in "helping with homework" and reteaching concepts where necessary.

A parent told me the other day that almost no one takes the BC course - perhaps only 10 to 12 kids per class.

This isn't fact-checked, and it may be wrong. Awhile back a student told us that there were 40 students in AP calculus, split half and half between AB and BC. Total class size was 120.

I don't have the patience to try to figure out whether 30% of an Irvington high school class is comparable to figures for same-SES peers across the country.

I should check private schools, actually. That would give me a rough comparison.

I do know that five percent of all high school students take AP calculus (I'll find the reference); don't know off-hand how that 5% is divided between AB & BC. [correction: make that 8% and rising, I presume]

I'll see if I can track that down.


stats on AP calculus enrollment

I've found a couple of statistics:

Once upon a time, calculus was the first college-level mathematics course taken by mathematically talented students. The students in first-semester calculus were mathematically motivated, generally well prepared, and they were seeing these ideas for the very first time. This is no longer true. Most of our best-prepared mathematics students arrive in college with credit for at least the first semester of calculus, many of them with credit for both semesters. Despite steady growth in majors in science and engineering, enrollment in first-semester calculus has been flat or slightly declining at both two- and four-year undergraduate programs. It is the College Board’s Advanced Placement Calculus Program that has been growing steadily at 7–8% per year (see figure 1).

In 2004 over 225,000 high school students took the AP calculus exam. This number is far larger than the number of students who took mainstream first-semester calculus in all four-year undergraduate programs in the Fall of 2000. By the time of the next CBMS survey in 2005–06, we can expect that more students will take an AP Calculus exam than will take mainstream Calculus I in the Fall of 2005 in all 2-year and 4-year institutions combined.

[snip]

The same pressures that are pushing Calculus I into the high school curriculum are doing the same for Calculus II. Traditionally, it was a very elite group of students who took BC Calculus, covering the entire two-semester college syllabus. That group of students also grew by 6–8% per year until the mid-1990s. Over the period 1995–98, the rate of growth of BC calculus accelerated to 10–11% per year, a rate that has held up since then. In 2004, the number of students taking the BC Calculus exam exceeded 50,000. It will likely exceed 60,000 by 2005–06, the year of the next CBMS survey.

source:
The Changing Face of High School Calculus
by David M. Bressoud, Macalester College

Here's more from the National Science Foundation:

Very small proportions of students complete advanced mathematics or science courses that provide college credit (such as AP/IB courses). The most popular category among these is AP/IB calculus; even there, only 8% of 2000 graduates completed such a course.

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Harvard placement in math courses...

BC Calculus course topics