No, they don't. If they do learn it, it's certainly not in 8th grade. My town's school system was the second in the entire state, and they taught Algebra I (ie

No, they don't. If they do learn it, it's certainly not in 8th grade. My town's school system was the second in the entire state, and they taught Algebra I (ie, factoring/FOIL) in 8th grade. I went to a well-respected private school, and they taught complex numbers in 10th grade, and polar coordinates only in the honors section of 10th/11th grade classes. For those, they taught matrix multiplication and determinants for 2x2 matrices only (ie, not 3x3 or up). This means that any real linear algebra was completely out of the picture. This was well more than enough to score a very good score on the SAT II Math IIC exam (is this still even around?) I was fortunate that I was able to teach myself outside of my school's curriculum (and my school also let me place out of certain classes), but overall, the standards are far below what you might hope.