7/26/2023 0 Comments Explain all students take calculusThe increase in the number of AP exams taken is not unique to calculus indeed, the total population of students taking exams doubled between 20, with the number of exams administered increasing by 150% over that period. Students and their parents seek an advantage in the increasingly competitive admissions tournament, and the number of AP courses taken is a metric that is easy for students to boost. ![]() There appear to be at least two driving forces behind the rush to calculus. This tripling of the proportion of students taking these exams feels wrong somehow. As one of my colleagues remarked after Bressoud's talk, it's not as if the talent pool has gotten that much deeper in the last 30 years. ![]() Today? That number has risen to nearly 350,000 students taking an AP exam in calculus in 2011 (roughly 15% of high school students). Nationally, about 60,000 students took an AP calculus exam my senior year (1987). That aligns with my personal experience in which there were about 150 students in my entire North Carolina county taking calculus in any given year (out of roughly 3,000 high school seniors). ![]() I heard Bressoud speak about some preliminary results of the study a few years ago, and one piece of data stuck in my head: in the mid-1980s, when I was in high school, approximately 5% of high school students took an AP exam in calculus. He's been thinking about this problem for many years and has synthesized a huge amount of data measuring high school and college calculus enrollments. Former MAA president David Bressoud led this five-year comprehensive study funded by the National Science Foundation.
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