[hcta]

I vaguely remember the treatment of statistics in my high school/college science classes where calculus wasn't used. It was confusing and tedious. They have you memorize quantiles of the normal distribution so you can answer questions referring to the central limit theorem without ever understanding it, because it is not really possible to understand it without understanding integration. Combined with the fact of the general incompetence of people designing high school curricula, I'm fairly convinced that statistics sans calculus as a mandatory requirement would be a waste of time, joke of a class that would the average kid hate math even more than they do today.

[DerekL]

Yes, you need to know about integration to understand the central limit theorem, or to do any statistics with continuous values. But most of the time spent in calculus class is not learning what limits, derivatives, and integrals are. It's mostly learning how to take a function defined as some algebraic expression and finding the limit, derivative, or integral as an algebraic expression.

How many jobs in science involve pushing around algebraic expressions?

[hulitu]

> How many jobs in science involve pushing around algebraic expressions?

Most engineering stuff. SW is an exception because SW testing is more about: if the input value can be any int value but customer requires that the function , when given 5 as input returns 3 as output then the function is tested only with 3 as input.