The purposes of calculus courses are often the acquisition of knowledge itself, the development of skills and the understanding of important concepts, such as functions, derivatives, the chain rule, integrals and the fundamental theorem of calculus. However, full conceptual understanding is frequently not achieved. In this article, we examine the extent to which college calculus courses meet these objectives by administering a twelve-question test to thirty students who had just completed a course in calculus at a Mexican university.