Comment by hakutsuru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hakutsuru | Hacker News Reader

Sorry if this is a bit off-topic, but sometimes it is the kid who accelerates themselves (and their parents would have no sense of the material).

Just in case you are a smart kid in high school, or helping one, Do Not Skip Calculus 1 in college based on taking the material in high school. This can be a very dangerous mistake.

If you are really confident, then get the syllabus for Calculus I from the college, and do problems from the textbook. Taking Calculus II as a first semester freshman can be very tough.

Do this only if you are confident and bored with Calculus I. Rushing foundation studies is the wrong choice for most students. I made this mistake, and thought I received honors on my engineering degree (and was a Masters student in my fourth year) -- Calculus II was the lowest grade on my transcript. Good luck.

But if you can get credit for Calc 1 and Calc 2 because you took the BC AP Calc test you should do. Starting Calc 3 as a freshman was great because it was a much smaller class.

Another option: take calc I, but differently. I finished calc II in high school, then for the first semester I took a class called “Honors Math I”, the first class in the math major track. I was a cs and physics major.

The class was sort of a survey that started with propositional and predicate logic, set theory, and hit bits of number theory and group theory before going deeper into continuous functions, differentiation and integration. Proofs all the way. At one point the prof quipped, “If you’re using numbers bigger than about 8, you’re not doing real math.”

The class did a great job reinforcing what I’d learned in high school, while setting me up for some of the beefier proof-based cs theory classes later on.

I took a combined calc 1 and calc 2 class in college after taking a calculus class covering AP calculus AB and BC in high school, which I think was a nice balance probably (my school didn't let you skip it completely). The refresher was nice (it had been a year since I took calculus in hs), but I might have been fine doing multivariable regardless. It all made a _lot_ more sense for me in college, I'm not sure if it was maturity or what that made it easier for me, but the difference was shocking.

I had the exact same experience!

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