For the first time since 2019, the Mount Greylock math department is offering AP Calculus BC in addition to AP Calculus AB this year. In the last few years, Mount Greylock has only offered the AB course for students, which essentially covers the first semester of a college calculus course, while the BC class covers two semesters of calculus.
Ann Marie Barber, who is teaching Calc BC this year, said the main difference between the two courses is that the BC class does “a little bit more with integration, Euler’s method, parametric equations, polars, vectors, and sequences and series.”
In recent years, Mount Greylock has not offered Calc BC because the BC course “only serves a really small amount of students,” Barber said. It can be hard to schedule classes within the math department because there are often “so many singleton classes,” since teachers can contractually only teach a maximum of three topics. So, adding another class increases the difficulty of scheduling.
Barber said that in the past, the department and school “have been told that AB is enough so that students can tackle college Calc pretty easily.” This year, because of interest from some students, the administration decided to offer BC as well. Whether this class will be available next year is still unknown and up to administration.
In the past, Barber said some students have opted to take the AB course but worked on the BC topics outside of the class. This way, they can still take the BC exam in the spring. Barber said students have been “very successful with that.” When a student takes the AP Calc BC exam, the student also receives an AB subscore and they can decide which one to use on their college applications.
Some students this year are choosing to do this even with the option of the BC course, taking the AB class and doing the BC topics on their own.
So far, the BC class is going well for the students involved. Junior Polly Rhie said that the material is making sense and “the balance of teaching and giving time to work” in class keeps the workload manageable. Rhie also mentioned that the smaller class size helps everyone be comfortable participating.
