How complicated is the calculus on the PCAT?

[ethyl]

I took it in October and for the life of me I can't remember the quantitative portion. I only remember looking at it like since I hadn't taken calculus in 3-4 years ( I got a 40 on the quantitative section ). Is it fairly basic calculus or should I memorize the chain rule, quotient rule and all that? I've been using the pcatprofessor but it hasn't given many calculus examples.

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[b*rizzle]

I took it in October and for the life of me I can't remember the quantitative portion. I only remember looking at it like since I hadn't taken calculus in 3-4 years ( I got a 40 on the quantitative section ). Is it fairly basic calculus or should I memorize the chain rule, quotient rule and all that? I've been using the pcatprofessor but it hasn't given many calculus examples.

To the best of my knowledge, the calculus on the PCAT from Oct 2004 contained lots of graph-type questions, lots of things related to natural logs and whatnot. Fairly basic calculus stuff, the kinds of things your prof most likely would have said "if you learn nothing else in this course, know this..." for. I don't specifically remember having to use the chain rule/etc but I dont think it could hurt you to brush up a bit on those. My recommendation is to study the graphs of different types of functions and know how changing different elements of the equation will affect the picture that they give you. Also know what the graph of something's first or second derivative might look like. I think this will provide you with a thorough enough review to fare well on the math section.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

 

[Gizmo]

I also thought the calculus section was really bad. I took calculus almost 9 years ago and made about the same score in the math section as you did for the Dec PCAT.

 

[Jonno1288]

From what I saw it seemed like the Calculus in the Quantitative section contained a lot of derivatives, integrals, logs, and graphs associated with sin/cos. If you're looking for a good study book, I recommend the one Kaplan gives with their PCAT course. I hadn't taken Calculus since highschool and I managed to get a 94. Hope this helps!