Changes to the advanced math pathway will now stop Math 3A students from skipping precalculus to directly take AP calculus AB, Assistant Principal Amanda Gross said in an email interview. These changes, made by the MHS administrators, math department teachers, and the Director of Secondary Education, were implemented mid-February, Gross said.
AP calculus AB teachers were seeing a large portion of students coming from Math 3A classes struggling due to a lack of a solid foundation in precalculus, said Gross. These teachers were concerned about students being unprepared to handle the AP level of math and believed changing the pathway would correct the problem, she added.
“The new advanced pathway is Math 3A to precalculus honors to AP calculus BC,” Gross said. In many cases students going into AP Calc AB from Math 3A in the past two years were not as mathematically prepared. … This was a flaw of the pathway, not a perceived fault with the course material in Math 3A. Changing the pathway should correct this error.”
All students have been informed of these changes through the course catalog, Gross said. Math 2A students were not informed of the change as a class while Math 3A students were, she said. It is still too early to tell how these new changes will affect the enrollment of Math 2A and 3A classes, Gross added. However, these new changes will most likely cause an increase in enrollment for precalculus Honors and perhaps calculus BC as well, Gross stated. AP calculus AB might also get a few enrollment changes as well, she said.
“These changes may cause a decrease in the enrollment of AP calculus AB,” Gross said. “Students can continue to move from precalculus to AP calculus AB. With the newly defined pathway, students wanting to move from Math 3A to AP calculus AB would need to take part in the summer Math Acceleration program as this would now be considered skipping a level of math. My hope is these changes will either decrease the dropout rate for AP calculus AB or it will not have an effect on the dropout rate.”
Many Math 3A students are deciding to follow this new pathway despite grievances, sophomore Clare Sanchez said in an interview via voice call. After hearing the announcement, she and many of her classmates expressed their disappointment regarding these changes, Sanchez said.
“I was really disappointed and a little upset, because [Math] 2A and 3A is kind of difficult,” said Sanchez. “I struggled in these classes, but I would always be like, ‘Okay I just have to push through this because if I go through these [classes] I’ll be able to skip to calculus AB. But then they just stopped doing that, so to find out that my motivation for taking the course [Math 3A] has been taken away was really disappointing. … When I told my friends they were all really upset as well because [Math 3A] is kind of hard compared to [Math] 3. For a lot of us, we were really disappointed because if we had known we wouldn’t be able to skip to [calculus AB] anymore, we wouldn’t have taken this class.”
Sanchez said she believes these new changes were recommended by her Math 3A teacher, Unyoung Yi, even before they became mandatory. She believes these changes should have not been implemented during the school year and should be moved to next school year, she said. Sanchez is not excited about having to take honors precalculus—a class that she said is notorious for being one of the hardest math classes offered at MHS and harder than calculus AB—in order to take calculus BC her senior year, she added.
“[Math 3A] really takes an emotional toll on me as a class,” Sanchez said. “I just kind of feel betrayed that I was basically fooled into taking Math 3A when I could have easily taken regular [Math] 3.”
Gross said she has not personally spoken to any Math 3A students regarding their feelings about these changes.
“I plan to go into the Math 3A classes soon to speak about the changes to the pathway,” said Gross. “Additionally, I would like to be able to conduct some parent outreach/education about the advanced pathways.”
I am interested in knowing for what reason the delay was made between 3A and AB. Is it related to content covered, or rigor of the content in question? If so, which content in it is missing? Would skipping from 3A to AB be worse than taking a summer course in Precalculus after taking Math 3, even though summer courses tend to have less rigor? (on the other hand, at least the content is covered in a summer course)
On a different note, I feel like HPC’s hate is at least somewhat undeserved. Granted, it is a hard class, with large amounts of points removed for small mistakes in tests and the like. However, it is an extremely fun experience due to the textbook’s (Dolciani’s Introductory Analysis) emphasis on proofs and interesting applications in some of the homework problems. The teacher is also extremely committed to working with the students, setting time aside for questions before school starts.