[russell]

All well and good if your kids are from a school known to the admissions department at the colleges they are applying to, otherwise the AP courses, with all their flaws, are a reasonable compromise that gets them college credit.

My kids took a different route when faced with a truly incompetent high school calculus teacher. My wife convinced the high school to allow them to take courses at the local community college for both high school and college credit. The courses were approved by the University of California so there was no issue about transfer of credits.

[cperciva]

a school known to the admissions department

It's worth noting that this can be an issue for graduate admissions too: When I was studying in Oxford, emails would come around the department on a regular basis asking "does anyone know anything about the University of FooBar? One of their students is applying". (Of course, Oxford is unusual in the extent to which it draws graduate students from around the world.)

[zamansky]

Colleges don't see AP scores until after a student is admitted so admissions only sees the fact that the kid is in the class. Also, from what I can tell, admissions offices do have a pretty good feel for the schools they read for.

Once a kid is accepted, schools already give placement tests so that takes care of that issue.

On the credit front, I think partnering with a college would yield better results (like what you did).

I also wonder how much the credits mean - if a kid can knock off a full semester, it's obviously a big saving but given the way colleges charge undergrads - a fixed amount for a varying number of credits, at the end of the day, I wonder if it makes much of a difference for a kid that gets a small handful of credits.

[argonaut]

1) AP exams can be taken independent of whether you've taken the class. A high school freshman can take any AP exam.

2) It's common in competitive high schools for students to start taking AP classes in junior year (or even sophomore year), so top colleges definitely do see AP scores for most of the top 30% of students applying.

For me, AP credit was huge. It let me skip calculus in college and a bunch of other very time-consuming classes (foreign language, etc.). Instead, it cleared up my schedule so by the end of college I was able to take multiple graduate CS classes.