Typically, they are associated with classes that teach the material, though they don’t have to be. CLEP are the closely related exams offered by colleges to allow students to place out of some classes. They are not associated with a class.
I don’t think it was called AP English, but senior year in High School I took a class that gave 3 credits of college English. No test that I remember. This didn’t really help me graduate early, but did allow me to register for classes earlier than 0 credit Freshman.
Brian
AP credit and college credit earned in HS aren’t necessarily the same things. For instance, some high schools will have programs where students can take actual college classes at a community college. That is, the student may actually drive over to the CC and sit in on the class on the CC campus. However, the university they eventually attend may or may not accept the credits. It’s the same as if the student got their associate at CC after HS and then transferred to a traditional university. The university may or may not transfer the CC credits depending on their transfer policy with that CC. In general, the AP credits are more transferable for college credit compared to college credit earned in HS.
My high school has such an arrangement with the local CC, which is about a Par-3 from campus. Makes it easier, but we are seeing some decline in AP enrollment in the applicable classes.
Our schools allowed kids to take CC classes in subjects the high school didn’t teach, like statistics.
I’m not sure how far it extended, but her senior year my daughter went half-time to Berkeley, as a fully matriculated student. Judging from the introductory session, there were a fair number of kids who did this.
My high school was the other way around - in my senior year, the school changed the class schedule so that every student had to take at least one class that didn’t let out before 1:15, unless they could come up with an acceptable reason. “I have a job that starts at 1:00” was acceptable; “I want to take a class at the nearby junior college that starts at 1:00” was not, and, in fact, was almost certainly the driving factor behind the change.
They have been a few mixed comparisons with actual first-year college classes but YMMV. While there are plenty of college students out there taking college algebra or pre-calc, some colleges don’t even offer those courses, and have intro physics for non-majors that is calculus-based. And I’m not talking engineering schools.
And sometimes these classes (called “college credit plus”, around here) are actually taught at the high school, with a teacher who also teaches ordinary high school classes, and who is officially an employee of both the high school and the college.
Ohio universities used to be really picky about this, until a law a few decades ago required all publicly-funded colleges in the state to accept credit for equivalent courses from all other publicly-funded colleges, and to be expansive in their definitions of what classes counted as “equivalent”.
When I was at Villanova, we definitely had science courses geared towards “jocks”. The astronomy department had a public observatory (staffed by the students) that anyone could come up to, and once we had a whole third-grade class come, who had been doing astronomy in their science lessons that week. Afterwards, the teacher sent us copies of their quizzes. We posted them in the hallway next to a test from the “astronomy for jocks” class, and not only was the third-grade quiz harder, but they did better on it.
I was in high school in the 60s in a one high school school district. We had no AP classes – no AP program. However, I took classes at UCLA during my high school senior year and was able to skip an entire quarter later due to the credits I earned.
I totally forgot! We did have AP tests. But we had no classes that “prepared” us for those tests. We just signed up for the tests we wanted and were scheduled at a nearby testing location (Hami High, for me). Sadly, I missed the English test which I would probably have aced. I did take the History one and got a 4, IIRC.
Okay, that reminds me of when they announced that 9th graders could report to the cafeteria on a certain day after school, and be given a test that, if they passed, meant they didn’t have to take 10th grade English, or could take “English 10X” if they had an intermediate score. A bunch of people, myself included, went there, and we were given a topic and told to write an essay about it, which we did.
THE NEXT DAY, I was told to report immediately to the principal’s office, and when she (yes, she; my elementary and junior high principals, back in the 1970s, were always women) saw the look on my face, being the first person to show up, she said, “You’re not in trouble.” Yeah, I had wondered what I might have done that I didn’t know about. Other people who wondered why they too had to go to the principal’s office started showing up, and we figured it out right away. That was fast!
Generally speaking, schools that expect everyone to come in ready to take Calculus are not schools that take very many kids who are in pre-cal as seniors. Furthermore, I think if you weight that for size of student body, the number of kids attending a school that requires Calculus for all undergraduates almost certain represents less than 5% of students, and probably less. Very few associates degrees require calculus, and many state university systems to not require calculus for many undergraduate degrees.
To give the full context, when AP Pre-Cal was announced, it got very, very ugly among “AP kids” (and parents). It was a constant stream of “AP Pre-Cal? that’s a joke, right? Pre-cal is like, a sophomore class. What kind of dummy takes pre-cal as a college course? Do they even offer it in college?” There was this widespread idea that it was an actual scam by College Board, and that no college anywhere would take the credit, so it was just a way to trick people in to paying money as a sophomore. I found this to be extremely hurtful and elitist. The undertone was "AP is for top-performing kids, not kids who want to go to their local community college and get an associates in HVAC (I looked: the local community college requires a math elective for their HVAC program–and Pre-Cal is one way to fill it).
That is the narrative that needs to be pushed against. One should never announce to a group of students anything even close to “Don’t take AP Pre-Cal; many colleges won’t take the credit”. It makes sense to say “don’t bother to take AP Pre-Cal if you are on track to take AP Calculus in high school”, but that’s a very different statement.
One interesting point about Physics 1 is that at my school, at least, the kids seem to struggle with it far more than Physics C–partly of course because they have Physics 1 first, and our Physics C teacher is better, but the other big difference is that Physics 1 requires you to really be able to explain concepts as you apply them. In Physics C you can get away with just doing the calculus.
Yeah, I feel like the College Board didn’t really market that one right, or something. As is clear from the rest of this thread, I also absolutely didn’t understand what the point of AP Precal was. I agree that there’s a sort of elitist “AP kid” thinking, which I guess the College Board is trying to overturn, but it… hasn’t happened.
When I was in high school and took the physics class that was basically what Physics 1 was called before it was an AP (I assume – it was algebra-based and not an AP B class), most kids hadn’t had calculus and a few of us were taking it concurrently. And we few had a huge advantage because the teacher (who was really excellent, and whom I had the next year for Physics C) would be trying to circumnavigate the idea of an instantaneous rate of change, and we’d be like, “oh, okay, you’re just talking about the derivative!” So… I wonder if that’s part of it. Do you know if kids at your school who have had calculus also struggle with Physics 1?
Though in support of your reasoning, when I took intermediate economics in college with math friends we all just did the calculus and had no idea what it meant in terms of economics, and whenever the problem sets asked “so what does this mean?” we would have to ask our one friend who had actually taken the first-year course 
The three standard university intro physics courses are generally referred to as “Calculus-based physics”, “Algebra-based physics”, and “Conceptual Physics”. Calculus-based physics is for students who have mastered algebra. Algebra-based physics is for students who have mastered arithmetic. Conceptual physics is for the students without even that.
Yes, there is some nonzero amount of calculus in a calc-based physics course. But it’s not very much, and what there is, is very easy calculus. If you’re really good in algebra but never actually took calculus, you could probably fake it for those one or two small bits, and still get an A. It’s just that, most students who are really good in algebra do take calculus.
My school is weird. A quarter of the kids take calculus as Freshmen and most of the rest take it as sophomores. They all take AP Physics 1 sophomore year. According to the Physics 1 teacher, the problem is that they really don’t want to explain concepts in words: they want to just do the math. I mean the kids who take Calculus as Freshmen generally do fine, because they are the sort of kids who take calculus as Freshmen. But they all find it a slog.
What?! I took calculus as a sophomore in high school, and I was the only one in my class, although there were plenty who took it as juniors and almost everyone as seniors, but this was a small school for the gifted. Are there enough people now who are force-feeding their children mathematics so that they have the tools to tackle calculus that early? Certainly I could have if I had made the effort, but why would I? What is there to gain with taking calculus that early? Do you move on to Linear Algebra and Differential Equations as upperclassmen?
Yeah, calculus freshman year is insane. We’ve got a couple of sophomores taking AB, and that’s already pushing the envelope pretty hard.
Even excellent math students can’t usually handle full mathematical rigor at that age. There are relevant brain-developmental milestones that usually kick in at around 15 or 16. There are a few kids who are genuinely ready for calculus at that age, but enough to fill a quarter of a school?
To clarify: a quarter of the Freshmen is 25 kids, so its not a huge group. Thats in a magnet program in a district wirh about 9k Freshman, so it’s a very small program.
We don’t think it has any particular benefit, and we don’t market it as such. Its mostly just that for kids who really love math, its fun to finally go that fast in math. They come in with A1 credit, and they have a double blocked math class (90 min a day). They do A2 and Pre-cal by about now, then Calc AB until May. Everyone takes geometry as a concurrent class. Its also truly a freshman calc class, so developmentally, its not a young, immature prodigy in a rool of big kids: its a freshman class, everyone is a freshman and the teacher expects the issues that come with that.
The bulk of the kids take double blocked A2/ pre-cal as Freshmen and then a double blocked AB class as sophomore. Thats a LOT of time spent on math, and they do very well. We do like this system because they can take BC as juniors and stats as seniors. They are solidly prepared for any STEM program.
One more thing: the kids who arent ready for the A2/pre-cal program take A2 double blocked. This allows them to catch up where they have skill gaps.
At the senior level, the Freshmen calc kids have a survey course in higher math. Middle group has to take AP stats, but can (abd often do) take the survey course concurrently, and the A2 group has to take BC, but can opt into the other two. So no matter where you start, the full sequence is available to you. So we do math at different paces, but don’t have tracks.
That’s what my sibling’s school does. They alternate between the two so kids who finish calculus BC aren’t stuck with AP Stats as their only math option.
Also, there are online classes. Hopefully better than the ones I took in the 90s.
A full third of my class took A1 in 7th grade. The Saxon math program doesn’t have a separate geometry class (it’s smeared out into the algebra and precalc classes), so that puts that group into AB in 10th grade. So taking it in 9th, something I definitely was not ready for, is just one year ahead of a large cohort.
Why do it? Fun. Takings whole year on a topic instead of a semester. Or getting the basic classes out of the way so they can focus on other topics in college.
I was simply enthralled by the breadth of AP classes at my high school in 1994. They had history, poli-sci, macro-and microeconomics, calculus and biotechnology. I could appreciate the resources spent to offer this curriculum. The credits even transferred to the state college here too. The benefit mostly was in talking with the hard-working students whose families taught them how to study and be academic.