Highschool AP classes and busy work is one the reasons my son is a fulltime dual enrollment student this year.
I will have to keep that in mind for my DD when she's older. I've been pretty appalled at what people are describing as "pre-AP" workload.
I graduated in the early 1990s from a school that offered no AP classes, petitioned the school board to take 7 (or maybe 8? I forget) classes in a 6-period day, and got into an Ivy League college, where I had no issue with the workload. And other than preparation for speech competitions, I don't remember having any homework at all. Maybe a couple of calculus problems, but for the most part, the assignment was on the board at the start of class, and I could have it done by the end of class.
It's not clear to me why you'd spend an hour in class every day + 3 hours of homework a night for 180 school days (720 hours), in order to get the same amount of knowledge you could reasonably expect to get from a 3-credit-hour college class (60 minutes of class per credit, plus 2 hours of out-of-class work per hour, times 3 credits, times 16 weeks = 48 hours). High school seniors are not that much slower than college freshmen, you know? More is not synonymous with better.
ETA: Maybe I'll need to keep that in mind sooner than I think. "Pre-AP" starts in middle school / 6th grade, and requires a signed contract, a prohibition on switching out of the AP level other than at semesters, and carries a warning:
Because the AP program is designed to prepare students for college level work, the classes proceed at a faster pace. Knowledge and skills needed are more complex and at a higher level of difficulty than those commonly required in regular classes. Homework is frequent and demanding; most assigned reading and writing is done outside of class, which may include weekends and holidays.
