Aleks?

[Daithi]

I did Intermediate Algebra, College Algebra, PreCalculus, and Statistics. I think all of my initial assessments were all under 33%, and I don't think I'm stupid. It took about a week for me to get through the two algebra courses --- working about 4 hours each evening and 8 hours on Saturday and Sunday. It took a little longer for statistics, because I didn't know anything about statistics. I used Statistics for Dummies to learn a little, but it was boring and didn't help much. It also took a little longer for precalculus because it had a LOT of topics, so it took a while to get to 70% (two and a half weeks).

I also took statistics before taking precalculus. This was a mistake. A lot of precalculus is algebra, and by the time I finished statistics I'd forgotten how to do some of the algebra problems. They weren't hard, but I needed a reminder, and this meant I had to redo a bunch of algebra.

If you are thinking of taking precalculus because you plan to do calculus later then I'd say don't bother. Just do Trig instead, because most of the precalculus course is just a lot of algebra. There isn't anything on things like limits or basic calculus. I think the only calculus related problem I had was finding a difference quotient. I would have done better to focus on Trig instead.