User blog comment:Adaneth Mirimë/Considerations for the College Search/@comment-25841881-20181014033334/@comment-33169548-20181014181012

It can definitely be more challenging, but it's much easier if you have saved your work from the prerequisite course so that you can refer back to it! One should never throw away material from AP or dual enrollment courses taken in high school.

One of the prerequisites for my Mathematics Senior Seminar course, which I took the fall semester of my junior year of college, was Differential Equations, which I had taken three years before in the fall semester of my senior year of high school. Doing differential equations again during Senior Seminar was difficult, since it had been so long since taking the class and I hadn't done anything at all involving differential equations since then. But it definitely starts coming back to you after the beginning, especially if you look back at your notes from the previous course!

One option in such a situation is to re-take the prerequisite course once you enter college. That is what Adanel did in a similar situation. She had taken AP Biology in her sophomore year of high school, earned a 5 on the exam, and was offered credit for both courses of her university's basic biology sequence when she entered. However, since it had been several years since she had taken AP Biology, she chose to accept credit only for the first biology course and then take the second biology course at her university, since she was going to be majoring in molecular and cell biology and needed to make sure that she had a good foundation for the more advanced courses. She said that taking the second biology course at her university was pretty easy, since she had done all of the material before, but that it was a very helpful review.

Another option in such a situation, if you have taken the prerequisite in high school and are offered credit for it but are not sure you remember the material well enough to take a course that builds on it, would have been to accept credit for the prerequisite course but then audit it when you enter university. In case you aren't familiar with the term, that means that you would sit in on the class, but would not be required to turn in any work and would receive neither a grade nor credit. Thus, you can review the material but not have to re-do all of the work.