Calculus Placement
Calculus Placement
Welcome to Colby and to the Department of Mathematics! We’re glad you’ll be joining us! Before proceeding, please carefully read our information on our Calculus program and what kinds of Calculus certain majors require.
Also remember:
- If you are planning to take a Calculus course at any point during your time at Colby, we recommend that you take it during your first semester here. Mathematics is cumulative and Calculus relies on what you learned in high school, so it’s best to start before you forget anything.
How Placement Works
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- Read the our information on our Calculus program and what kinds of Calculus certain majors require. (Hopefully, you’ve already done that!)
- Read through this page completely. If you are an incoming student, you need to fill out the placement QUESTIONNAIRE. After filling out the questionnaire, a Calculus placement marker will be added to your Colby academic record. To be able to register for MA125, you will need to have received a questionnaire placement marker MA019, and to have consequently passed a placement TEST [follow the link to enroll yourself in the Moodle course it takes you to; the test is there]. This will produce a placement marker MA025 on your Colby record.
- You register for a Calculus course based on your placement marker and seat availability.
What makes Colby Calculus different from my previous math classes?
One of the biggest differences that you’ll likely encounter is that all of our calculus courses focus more on ideas and concepts than on routine calculations. This might be different from your experience of high school math classes, and it is a good thing! Computers can do the calculations for us, but we have to understand what we are asking them to calculate, why we might want to calculate something in the first place. Furthermore we need to be able to judge whether or not the answers we get are correct and useful. You should not expect to just sit down and get through a problem set in one burst. Both class time and homework are designed to make you percolate ideas, experiment with approaches, and to think hard!
Homework assignments will take much longer than before. This is by design! College classes move faster than high school classes. (The good news is that your whole daily schedule is completely different too!) The typical rule of thumb for College classes is that you should spend 2-3 hours on course material outside of class for each hour in class. Our classes meet approximately 4 hours per week, so that means you should be spending 8 – 12 hours outside of class on course material. Good part of that time will be spent on assignments. Be sure to talk with your professor about how to use that time effectively.
How can I succeed in Calculus?
Finally – here’s the link to the Questionnaire!
The Calculus Placement Questionnaire (you need to log into your Colby account to access the questionnaire). If you have questions about placement that these pages don’t answer, please email your questions to the Mathematics department chair (Leo Livshits at [email protected]).
See you in the Fall!