In the end, no one is forced to take anything. School academic requirements are known in advance. I know of kids who didn't apply or choose schools because they did not want to fulfill certain requirements.
Should college students be forced to take calculus to graduate.
- Thread starter dailybuck777
- Start date
Your skill in this is very likely related to your yearly trips to Colorado.
And, if you’re stumped as to WHY something works the way it does, simply remember that it’s almost surely related to the Mean Value Theorem.
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And, if you’re interested in a certain field and pick a school based on that school’s not requiring calculus for a degree in that field, then you’re going to face a big challenge when it comes to finding a job.
What a simpleton attitude. You do not need calculus for every field. You also conveniently avoid the fact that many people simply are not good at math. Yet they can do their job just fine. Comp Sci major here, calculus is certainly legitimate for that field but it's not for many others. "It's not that hard" is not a legitimate reason to require it for many, many majors.
It is amazing to me how many Americans simply cannot grasp the simple concept that not everyone is like them. And then to impose their own mantra on every other person without considering that, is the root cause of our societal problems.
It’s not my attitude. It’s a fact. I’m not arguing that this is the way it should be, I’m just pointing out that it’s the way things work nowadays. A kid with a BS in Biology is always going to have a leg up on someone with a BA, regardless of whether or not the job requires calculus.
I’ll stipulate that I agree with you, that you don’t need calculus for every field, and that choosing whom to hire based on whether or not that person has taken calculus is, in general, silly.
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I work in policy and statistics are very useful. Few use advanced statistics as they are difficult to communicate and, in my experience, people overestimate their ability to interpret the results and methodology. Almost everyone with a Master's degree has taken an advanced stats course, but that doesn't mean they understand advanced stats. This overconfidence leads to misuse, e.g. using stats without theoretical models (just inserting a bunch of variables), using the wrong technique leading to useless results (linear regression instead of logistic regression), or not exploring multiple models and why they sometimes present different results and how to solve those differences (bootstrapping), or mismashing databases without understanding how the data are collected and defined. No need for calculus.
There are actually a lot of smart and talented kids. The dumb ones just stick out like a spouting whale.
I dropped calculus as a freshman and recall how disappointed my dad (EE) was, but I was struggling with it even though I was acing my other classes. I wasn't interested in being an engineer and didn't see the point at 18. I eventually graduated from PSU in '91 with a BS without taking it, but I had to take integral and differential calculus (and an advanced statistics class) my first semester in grad school. I later had an elective MBA class in mathematical programming (linear and non-linear optimization) that completely changed the direction of my life. I got my first real programming job largely because of that class and the mathematical concepts involved. Over the past 25 years I can count on one hand the times I've had to use calculus, but it's pretty cool when it comes up and it's amusing to see who's equipped to handle those situations.
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