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My son did "Business Calculus" at a large state university. I have a masters in science and had taken many quite difficult math courses in my day. I looked at what he was asked to do and saw his exam papers. Needless to say "Business Calculus" had little to do with business and a lot to do with making math as difficult as possible. The class average was a C and I believe many of the students had taken AP calculus in high school. It was one of the courses whose purpose was not to teach but to prop up the university-industrial complex.

EDIT. Below is an example (not from his instructor but the same material). Remember this is for "business calculus". It just seems like silly math tricks to me. https://people.tamu.edu/~jdkim/math142fall2019/math142week11...




just glancing over this pdf it doesn't seem so bad. The first couple of problems are just integrations with some very obvious u-substitutions.


That's what parent said: "silly math tricks" that will never, ever be relevant in business after 1930, now that we have calculators.


Because mental math is useless as well now that we have calculators..


That's... totally normal calculus curriculum, and is pretty elementary, not advanced.

It's true you won't do a symbolic integration ever again, but practice learning stuff like that will serve them well when they're learning intricate tax code rules and principles of managerial finance, cash flow, rates of return etc.

I mean, now that I say all that, they'd probably be best served by just jumping into the complex business and finance math and skipping symbolic integration, once they totally understand integration conceptually. But if they don't, they're still getting good practice out of it, especially if they find it challenging. That means they are learning problem solving techniques they didn't know, and need to know.

The only way you're right and it's a waste of time is if they find it easy.




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