MHS students are no longer able to accelerate from Integrated Math II (IM 2) to honors pre-calculus, according to assistant principal Sean Anglon in an email interview. In the same email, Anglon mentioned that UC math professors have signed a petition to re-establish the use of SAT in admissions because students arrive at college with gaps in their mathematical understanding.
There have been a lot of freshmen that join and quickly drop out of honors pre-calculus because they are not used to the rigor, math and honors pre-calculus teacher Salvi said.
“They have accelerated a lot, so they have a lot of gaps,” Salvi said. “Quite a few are like ‘This is the first time I’ve not gotten an A in a class.’ It’s a first for a lot of them, but freshmen usually are more shocked by it because they’ve had it easy so far. However, out of the ones who do remain, freshmen have been good in my class.”
Overall, Salvi has noticed a decline in students’ fundamentals, she said.
“Not just honors; even my Math I, Math III classes that I teach, I feel like they need a little bit more preparation,” Salvi said. “They need a little bit more support to get to where they need to be. So overall, I feel like the level of math readiness has declined.”
Math teacher Annie Nguyen says that there are sophomores who have taken honors pre-calculus who either excel in her AP Calculus BC class or lack the foundations because they’ve skipped so much, she said. There were only four sophomores in her BC class when she first got sophomores in her classes, she added.
“Back then, we didn’t let kids just skip classes—self study—and just take a test,” Nguyen said. “The kids who were sophomores who were in BC were really strong because they knew all the material; they were advanced kids. Kids now – they keep skipping. When they keep skipping, they’re going to lack foundation skills, and this is why the colleges are seeing it too, because so many kids skip in high school that their core foundation is not strong.”
Senior Kaichen Huang, who took honors pre-calculus in his freshman year, thinks that honors pre-calculus prepared him well for AP Calculus BC, he said.
“I think BC was way easier than pre-calculus honors,” Huang said. “Doing it as a freshman brought me back to reality and how hard high school could be, and it definitely built me really good study habits that I later used in AP Chemistry and my other APs. I did pretty well in BC, way better than I did in pre-calculus honors because I picked up the good study habits from taking pre-calculus honors.”
Huang says that he thinks the change “really sucks” because taking honors pre-calculus allowed people to take Calculus BC as a sophomore.
“Once you’re done with BC, you have all that elective room to do a bunch of other APs,” Huang said. “If you can’t do pre-calc honors anymore, you’re gonna be taking BC as a junior, and I feel like BC is a tough AP to take as a junior combined with the STEM APs and something like that.”
Salvi says that, in addition to a strong academic background, students who do well in her class have good soft skills, skills that incoming freshmen have not yet been able to develop.
Soft skills as “in terms of organization of your materials, having a discipline timeline, and being good at time management, being good at taking setbacks, learning from mistakes, moving on, being ready for the next test, and so on: I think those kind of soft skills also help students a lot,” Salvi said.
