AP Precalculus
A relatively new course, taught unevenly — and the one the next two years are built on.
The College Board only launched AP Precalculus in 2023, which means most schools are still figuring out how to teach it. Some are doing it well. Some renamed the precalculus course they already had and moved on. And a fair number of students are, in practice, teaching it to themselves out of a textbook and whatever they can find online.
“Pre”calculus sounds like a warm-up, but it’s not.
Some schools treat it that way — but a student who coasts through it walks into AP Calculus already behind.
- It’s the actual foundation of AP Calculus: Functions, trig, and rates of change all come back in the first weeks of calculus. A student who never really got them the first time now struggles with calculus while repairing precalculus underneath it — which is about as fun as it sounds.
- There’s a real exam and real college credit: It isn’t a warm-up course with a warm-up assessment.
- It’s the math grade colleges tend to see: Precalculus students are often juniors, or younger, so the course is finished — and on the transcript — before college applications go out. A senior’s AP Calculus grade often lands after colleges have already decided. So precalculus is the one where a stronger grade still counts toward admissions — and there’s still time to build it.
The course, unit by unit
AP Precalculus is organized into four College Board units — the exam tests the first three.
Polynomial & Rational Functions
End behavior, zeros, asymptotes, and reading what a graph is telling you
Exponential & Logarithmic Functions
Growth and decay, inverses, and why logs are the way out of an exponent
Trigonometric & Polar Functions
The unit circle, periodic behavior, identities, and polar graphs
Functions Involving Parameters, Vectors & Matrices
Some classes cover it and some don’t; the AP exam doesn’t test it, and I help with it either way
All four units are really about one thing: what functions are and how they behave.
AP Calculus next year? That’s one of the three courses I teach — so the work we do here is the foundation I’ll be building on when your student gets there.
Precalculus taught by someone who teaches the calculus it leads to
I know exactly what your student will need in AP Calculus next year, because AP Calculus is one of the three courses I teach. Precalculus taught by someone who also teaches the calculus it leads to is a different experience than precalculus taught in isolation.
- ~20 years in education, and a former Department Chair of Mathematics & Computer Science.
- Degrees in physics and civil engineering — I learned this material as a tool for solving real problems, so “when would I ever use this?” gets an actual answer, not a shrug.
- Trained to diagnose misconceptions, assess true understanding, and design the instruction that fixes both — not merely solve the problem.
- I teach the course this one feeds into. I know what’s coming, and I build toward it.
Dr. Hurley taught me both Pre-Calculus and AP Computer Science A. … There never was a dull moment in these classes, and I walked away from them with confidence in my quantitative and coding abilities.
ZachPrecalculus & Computer ScienceHarvard · now a data scientist at Booz Allen Hamilton