By Benjamin Hong, Staff Writer
This year, College Board has announced a new addition to their Advanced Placement (AP) curriculum: AP Precalculus. Covering everything from matrices to functions, this new course offers students the opportunity to earn college credits for precalculus, beginning in the fall of 2023. While many of the details are still being finalized, this new course has activists and Hawks alike excited about the possibilities of this new addition to College Board’s college-level courses.
One of the main hopes for AP Precalculus is that it will help bring more talent into the STEM field. College Board has found that approximately 40% of STEM major college students switch to non-STEM majors after being unsuccessful in gateway mathematics courses such as calculus as a result of inadequate preparation from their high school curriculum. Researchers from Just Equations (a nonprofit organization working to solve educational inequities in math) stated that “the evidence is clear that calculus functions as a critical gatekeeper for US students seeking to enter STEM majors and careers,” which can serve to deter STEM hopefuls who are less mathematically inclined. AP Precalculus is intended to help remedy some of the underlying problems behind these issues by better preparing students interested in STEM for college-level math courses and enabling them to pursue their career goals through a standardized curriculum.
While this goal is certainly ambitious, those working to solve the inequities in higher-level math have even loftier dreams in mind. Many schools that serve students of color and/or low-income backgrounds do not offer high-level math courses. Across the country, AP Calculus and Statistics classes are only around 5% African-American and 17% Latino. On top of this, a 2020 study by the New York Equity Coalition found that when comparing students of equal mathematical proficiency, lower-income students were 22% less likely to be enrolled in advanced math classes. Adrian Mims Sr., founder of the Calculus Project (a program whose goal is increasing the number of students from historically underserved groups that complete AP Calculus) describes the new course as “an opportunity to better prepare diverse groups of students that have historically been underrepresented to give them this access if they choose to do that.”
These goals are certainly admirable and are likely to come to fruition to some degree when the course begins to be offered at schools. However, here at River Hill, AP Precalculus’ impact is predicted by some to be practically nonexistent. Caroline Munding, a Precalculus teacher at River Hill, feels that AP Precalculus will probably not be implemented at River Hill because “G/T is pretty intensive (12 very rigorous units), and we already offer precalc CC, which is college credit.” Munding predicts that the main impact of the new course on most River Hill students is the AP exam that comes with the class, explaining that “if it’s offered by College Board, students can self-study and take the test after taking the preexisting course” in a manner similar to an SAT subject test. However, if the course does end up being added to River Hill’s course catalog, Munding expressed that because of her love for Precalculus, she would “definitely be interested in teaching AP Precalculus.”
Despite Munding’s prediction, ninth grader Daniel Oh, a current Algebra 2 student at River Hill, said that if the course did end up being offered, he would probably take it, as he felt it would be “good preparation for future math classes and taking it would make the transition from Pre-Calc to Calc a lot more manageable.”
AP Precalculus has many goals in mind for its debut, and there is no doubt that these hopes, if realized, would have an enormous impact on hundreds of thousands if not millions of students across the country, albeit less so at River Hill. However, Hawks, both students and teachers alike, are still interested and excited about this new addition to the roster of college-level courses offered by College Board.