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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

> the notoriously difficult college math class, Calculus I

Are college courses in the United States standardised? Does every college have a course they call Calculus I and have the same content and level of difficulty?

Calculus seems to be a really big deal in the US education system. In the UK we learn about differentiation and integration in what you would call highschool as just another topic among many, and I don't remember it being introduced with the branding or fanfare that US calculus courses seem to have. Maybe treating it a no big deal is helpful to avoid the barrier that it apparently creates.

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That's because our marketing department in the UK isn't as awesome as the ones they have in the States... have you not noticed that _everything_ has far more fanfare in the States than anywhere else on earth? Everything is so dramatic... including the "notoriously difficult" calculus. It's just their way of patronizing you with "don't worry if you don't understand, it's notoriously difficult" or put you on a pedestal "wow, you must be a wizard to understand that, it's notoriously difficult."

It's just like everything else in the visible universe: A bunch of simple fundamentals put together to make something complicated, wrapped up in a bunch of jargon making it look scarier than it is, like the monster under your bed that only exists in your head.

>>Everything is so dramatic...

It's true, we Americans love the spectacular. Landing on the moon? Spectacular! The Super Bowl? Spectacular! Bombs over Baghdad? Spectacular!

I'm not sure why, but we can always blame Los Angeles.

Who mostly just has spectacular traffic jams... which I think we can all agree are spectacular. Widest highways on the planet and you use them as a parking lot... you're a weird bunch :P

American here. I took Calculus I in both highschool and college. I thought it was easy in highschool. The rigor of the college course was incomparable. Mostly because the way they asked the questions on the exams were far more demanding.

That's because in high school you're not really given the whole picture of how to apply your knowledge and you don't have the life experience yet to understand how to use it usefully so while you understand the math in a limited fashion, you don't really get it. By the time you're in College, you're expected to really get it by the time you sit down in an exam and can apply it to the real world. So the exam questions are designed to test if you really do get it or if you're just going through the motions of what you were taught.

Agreed, Calculus I in university is more demanding. I had the fortune of using the same text in high school as in university. However, the difference between the classes was pace. In high school we had class every day and took a week to work through a chapter. In university we had class three times a week and went through a chapter each class. All told it took one semester (15 weeks) at university to cover what took an entire school year (30 weeks) in high school.

College courses aren't standardized, but calculus is often a weeder class and far more difficult than previous classes.

This is often unintentional. The real problems are that kids are being passed through high school without learning math and that the other college classes are far too easy and lack any rigor. Therefore a class that requires memorization/understanding of concepts and isn't open book is considered incredibly difficult.

If english/history/science general education classes weren't such jokes then calculus wouldn't be considered a bottleneck.

The first year or two of math (and physics, and to some degree, CS) are roughly standardized. There are variations, not only across colleges, but within the same college (honors vs. non-honors, calculus for business, calculus for pre-meds who won't take any more math), and among professors teaching different sections of the same class even. But to a first order of magnitude...roughly the same stuff.

Many American students have often taken a year or so of calculus (sometimes more) before starting. But these are so-called "Advanced Placement" (or AP) classes which are considered "college-level" (even though at top colleges, this is basically a requirement to get in). At less competitive/less technically focused colleges/programs however, most students may not have taken it.

You can think of AP as an equivalent of A-levels in the UK. I'm not sure if calculus concepts are A-level or not? But either way, from what I know of UK education, you can get by not taking mathematics A-level...it's the same for AP mathematics here.

Calc 1 in college is a common weed-out class.

This. I took Calc 1 twice. First time was during the day in a big auditorium style classroom. The prof had a pompous attitude, like he didn't even want to be there. I dropped the class mid-term. I re-took it in the evening. Smaller class size, mostly "non-traditional" students. Prof was awesome. Frequently stopped the lesson to re-explain things and made sure everyone was understanding, stayed after class to help students. Because of that class I actually "got" calculus.

Yes, and I believe many colleges make it intentionally difficult. My Calc I class was given by an instructor with a heavy Asian accent. I had to struggle to understand every other word.

My Chemistry for Engineers class was in a large classroom that was under construction.

Needless to say, I went for MIS instead of CS/EE. I ended up taking many CS classes, so it worked out well.

On a side note, teaching is really difficult. Knowledge of the subject is the minor skill. My parents were teachers and I considered it in college but didn't have the patience.

Weed-out is a really bad way to look at teaching. It puts people in the mind set looking for excuses to get people to fail. The attitude should be teach-in.

If someone passes your entrance tests then in most cases if they fail either you failed to develop the ability that you decided they had, or your entrance test was wrong.

The UK military realised this a while ago and describing any activity as being 'weed-out' is a big no-no.

They are only informally standardized, but are usually quite consistent between colleges/universities. You have single-variable differentiation, integration, and applications. Possibly some of the easier differential equations. The high school advanced placement (AP) curriculum usually goes a bit further but in a less rigorous manner.

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