Why does it seem like american highschools have harder Curricular's?

I met a bunch of people who exchanged in The University of Sydney and became quite close with them.

One of the things that pop up is the fact that they all seem to have learnt harder math topics such as conics and differentiation by grade 10 or 11 whereas the Sydney highschool curriculum only teaches conics/complex numbers in 4U (four unit maths, the highest level highschool math in grade 12/senior year) and differentiation in 3U grade 11 math or 2U grade 12 math.

They all seemed to be surprised that 17 year olds in Sydney did those topics let alone the topics being in the hardest math levels.

Can someone shed some light?

Thanks

Submitted April 16, 2017 at 10:30PM by fafafromNYC http://ift.tt/2psqbkL