• Welcome to Religious Forums, a friendly forum to discuss all religions in a friendly surrounding.

    Your voice is missing! You will need to register to get access to the following site features:
    • Reply to discussions and create your own threads.
    • Our modern chat room. No add-ons or extensions required, just login and start chatting!
    • Access to private conversations with other members.

    We hope to see you as a part of our community soon!

Help Needed: High school & college education

LegionOnomaMoi

Veteran Member
Premium Member
As someone who passed AP calculus relatively easily but is 12 years away from it, I couldn't begin to do those problems anymore.
I don't think more than a handful of AP calculus students could answer them. In the predecessor to this thread, I talked about a study conducted to see if students who had just completed Calc. I at a university could solve "non-trivial" calculus problems. The participants were given one hour to answer 5 questions, with liberal partial credit granted. Not a single student answered any of the questions correctly. What's even more interesting (at least to me) was the results of my own little pseudo-study. I don't know that many people who have taken calculus recently or even at all (aside from those who use it regularly), which is why I started this thread. However, after reading that study I went to my sister, who had taken calculus maybe 4-5 years ago. I didn't ask her to solve any of the problems, I just asked if there were any she thought she could and if so how she would do so. I think two of them she had an idea as to how she would solve it. Later (last summer), I was visiting relatives in Colorado and had the opportunity to talk with one of my cousins who had just finished her undergrad and had been accepted into a biological and chemical engineering doctoral program. She had taken 3 semesters of calculus and at least one course on differential equations. So she had much, much more experience in calculus than my sister AND much more recent experience. She couldn't even describe how she might solve any of the questions.

In other words, her calculus education made it more difficult for her to answer questions from calculus I, which is like not being able to do arithmetic because you learned algebra.
 
Top