> 1. It's not clear that AP Stat disadvantages students versus AP Calc.
This is what stuck out to me.
Isn't AP Calculus the obvious choice if you have to choose between AP Stats and AP Calculus?
1. Calculus is really, really useful. Maybe AP Stats is also useful, but singling out Calculus as an example of useless signalling sets off really loud alarm bells.
2. If you want a STEM/Engineering degree, at least one Calculus course is required. More importantly, often a long sequence of 2-4 courses (Calculus I, II, III and ODEs) are required. Because of that long list of sequentially dependent required courses, getting one or two calculus courses out of the way in high school is enormously useful (like, "graduate a semester earlier for each course" useful). AP Stats is not at the head of this sort of long sequential course dependency.
3. The AP Stats course has a major disadvantage: lots of colleges/majors that require a stats course don't accept AP Stats as credit because they require a calculus-based statistics course.
> 1. Calculus is really, really useful. Maybe AP Stats is also useful, but singling out Calculus as an example of useless signalling sets off really loud alarm bells.
34 years old. Been writing software since I was 14. Used to know some calculus and sometimes poke at picking it back up because I feel like I "ought to". Have usually been the one to tackle tough or odd problems where I've worked.
Haven't once managed to find a reason to use calculus for anything whatsoever. Not a damn thing to differentiate, not a damn thing to integrate. I think the need for it is in a very, very narrow slice of all jobs, even in "STEM".
Statistics is 100% for sure more useful to me, in everyday life and at work. And I've not even worked on anything especially stats-ish, it just happens to come up a lot. That's the thing I really ought to work to get better at.
While people often don't have to do the explicit differentiation and integration taught it calculs that doesn't mean you aren't using knowledge learned in a calculus class.
I often think about rates flows and how they relate to each other. For example to do monitoring we count the total number of messages received in each task at a given time, then use the diffrence to get a rate. That is basically differentiation and understanding calculus makes it easier.
The other thing you acquire from doing Calculus is problem solving experience, figuring out how to apply various approaches to a problem to get to a desired solution. In this way calculus strengthens your brain similar to how a sports player might do weight lifting even if their sport doesn't involve lifting heavy objects.
I think lots of people understand rates without doing calculus. For instance distance vs velocity vs acceleration is a pretty simple and intuitive idea to understand.
There is an enormous amount of evidence that weight lifting transfers to sports. But I don't think there is much if any evidence that calculus transfers to general problem solving.
> 34 years old. Been writing software since I was 14.
We have very similar profiles.
I use calculus every day.
> Statistics is 100% for sure more useful to me, in everyday life and at work.
I use statistics every day too, working on ML systems.
> That's the thing I really ought to work to get better at.
The calculus comes in pretty damn quick. See also the third point in my original post; concretely, every ML course I've ever seen requires Calculus as a pre-requisite.
It really depends on the field. In many branches of science, statistics is really important and calculus not really at all. I'm a biomedical scientist and I use statistics every day to interpret the results of experiments. Calculus, not so much. And yet I was required to take three semesters of calculus as an undergrad, and while I took a statistics course then (and more in grad school), that was optional. It really should be the other way around.
This is what stuck out to me.
Isn't AP Calculus the obvious choice if you have to choose between AP Stats and AP Calculus?
1. Calculus is really, really useful. Maybe AP Stats is also useful, but singling out Calculus as an example of useless signalling sets off really loud alarm bells.
2. If you want a STEM/Engineering degree, at least one Calculus course is required. More importantly, often a long sequence of 2-4 courses (Calculus I, II, III and ODEs) are required. Because of that long list of sequentially dependent required courses, getting one or two calculus courses out of the way in high school is enormously useful (like, "graduate a semester earlier for each course" useful). AP Stats is not at the head of this sort of long sequential course dependency.
3. The AP Stats course has a major disadvantage: lots of colleges/majors that require a stats course don't accept AP Stats as credit because they require a calculus-based statistics course.