Calculus Placement Exam

Welcome to Kenyon! This year, we are pleased to be able to offer Calculus Placement exams online before orientation. If you choose to take the exam, you can do so in a relaxed environment before coming to campus and your placement information will be available when you arrive.

If you will not be taking calculus at all next year, you can skip the rest of this page. Regardless, we are looking forward to meeting you in a few weeks and seeing you in classes and around our beautiful campus (our department offers many courses outside of calculus, in addition to fun social and extracurricular activities)!

Should I take a Calculus Placement exam? Which one should I take?

If you have obtained credit for calculus through AP, A-levels or transfer, you do not need to take a placement exam. Since the IB curriculum recently changed, if you have IB credit, please contact Professor Aydin (aydinn@kenyon.edu)about whether you should take a placement test. The Mathematics and Statistics section of First Things First gives specifics about your Calculus Placement for various tests and scores.

If you have not studied calculus, you do not need to take the placement test. If you want to take calculus (you need a solid algebra and trigonometry background), just sign up for Calculus I.

If you have studied calculus but do not have AP, A-level, or transfer credit, we are offering two placement exams. The first helps you decide whether to sign up for Calculus I or Calculus II. The other helps you decide whether you are ready for Calculus III.

Why take the placement exam?

The purpose of a Calculus Placement exam is to give you our best advice about the right level calculus course for you. When you sign up for a course you want to know that you have the background necessary to support your study in the course. On the other hand, you don’t want to end up in a course for which you are overqualified — you will be bored and taking it will preclude a valuable educational experience you could have by taking another class instead.

An important point: Since the placement exam simply provides you with information about how well-prepared you are for a given course, you should not try to “bend” the results by using resources not specifically allowed. The exam is not proctored, but we can only give you good advice if the results reflect what YOU know and what YOU can do.

It’s been a while since I studied calculus. I am worried that I have forgotten a lot.

This is totally expected on a placement exam. Everyone who takes the exam is in a similar boat. Whereas getting half to two-thirds of the points would not be a good result on a cumulative exam taken at the end of a course, our “cutoff” for recommending the next class is always somewhere in this range. We just want to make sure you aren’t in over your head in the next class.

Should I spend time studying/reviewing for the placement exam?

It can’t hurt to spend an hour or two thinking about calculus before you take the exam. No more is needed, certainly. (Or not. In past years, students have taken these in the middle of a hectic orientation period; they rarely had a chance to review.) We want to know what you have in your head as you walk into the class on the first day.

There is also a “practice test” available for you to see what the format looks like and practice uploading a scanned document so that you have an idea of how multiple choice and short answer questions will appear in the test environment. This can be accessed in Moodle (see instructions).

When do I take the placement exam?

The test opens at 7 a.m. on Tuesday, Aug. 6, 2024 and closes at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024. Since the test is 2 hours long, you will need to start it no later than 3 p.m. EDT on Aug. 21.

How will I get my results and what should I do with them?

After the window for taking the exam closes, math and statistics faculty members will look at your work on the placement exam and make a determination about which course to recommend for you. We will send this information to your faculty advisor. Your advisor will share the recommendation with you.

What will I need in order to take the placement exam?

No books; no notes; no other sources — electronic, print or human. Just you and what is in your head.
The exam is written to be completed without access to any mathematical technology — no calculator; no mathematical software.
Many of the questions are multiple choice, but a few are “free response.” For these, you will write your work on a piece of paper and upload a scan of your work. So you will need a pencil and paper and a mechanism for scanning your work. If you do not have experience with scanning work, try the free app Cam Scanner on your phone.

How do I access the exam?

Kenyon uses a course management system called Moodle. The placement exams are implemented in Moodle’s test/quiz environment. It is likely that many of your courses will post course information on Moodle and that you will get very used to accessing it once you get to campus. However, this may be the first time you will need to access Moodle. So here are your instructions:

First, you will need to have activated two-factor authentication. If you are having any trouble with this, contact the Kenyon technical support helpline at helpline@kenyon.edu or 740-427-5700; they can walk you through the process.

Go to moodle.kenyon.edu.
Log in with your Kenyon username and password. You will need two-factor authentication to complete the login.
Once you are logged in to Moodle, you should see a block titled Calculus Placement Exams. Click on that block. The rest should be relatively self-explanatory.
You will have two hours from the time you start the exam to complete it, including scanning and uploading your work. We expect the exam to take about an hour, but we allow for two to give plenty of time to think about the questions, write your answers and scan and upload your work.

Calculus Placement Exam Information