Anecdata, but in my honors / AP courses in High School, I was one of two students, our of ~30, whose parents did not have a college degree. Like 20 of the student's parents worked at the local Lockheed Martin. I don't think this was entirely genetics, as much as culture, since I knew plenty of people in my life who were quite smart but lacked academic discipline.

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parineum 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm more in your camp of "it's culture" but I think it's a lot to do with the amount of attention a parent can pay to their kids education. Some of that is cultural but sometimes it's just a time constraint. Either due to financial constraints (and time spent working), single parents or whatever.

Kids obviously vary in aptitude but the ones that actually get the chance to excel are usually the ones that are getting an extra push at home. Some kids you just can't stop though and excel regardless.

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bilbo0s 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The issue is not what happens in high school.

The issue is that when all of these AP/Honors Calc people get to college they don't even make it to Simpson's rule before they're weeded out. That's the problem that most college professors are talking about. How are we creating more and more and more AP/Honors/"Gifted" kids every year, yet the performance of all of these kids when they enter university is abysmal? How is first semester calculus a "weed-out" course when so many of these kids enter with transcripts indicating they've already taken calculus?

I mean, I can totally see where the professors are coming from. We send every state flagship university what all of these very good high schools claim are the cream of the crop, and many of the students sent are just not up to the task. It has to be the school system at some point?

	▲	aleph_minus_one 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> How is first semester calculus a "weed-out" course when so many of these kids enter with transcripts indicating they've already taken calculus? German universities have a simple solution: students who believe that they have already "learned" calculus in school (in a sense every pupil with an Abitur school diploma (the kind of school diploma that you need in Germany to study at a university) had to learn) should hold to this belief at their own peril. :-) Hint: After one week, these kids will hopefully have realized that the level of calculus that they learned in school was very shallow. :-)
	▲	gim89 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I took a calculus course in high school. There were maybe six of us. Everyone elss took stats. The teacher was fine, if if a bit. Most of us used the class as a goof off segment. I often snuck out to go work on freelancing projects I was doing at the time. We found we could mostly pass the course work could be plugging in to online solvers. The tests were heavily curved. Frankly if you threw a simple derivative or integration at me these days I'd be staring at you like and idiot. I remember snidely telling people I didnt care because it didnt need calculus to develop software. I do regret it.
	▲	3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
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