All students ought to take AP exams in 8th grade, since research shows that such students do as well as 11th and 12th graders
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LOL! Really, though, those stats combined with the "PSAT scores are good predictors" would seem to be pretty solid support for letting way-out-there younger kids take AP classes.
I'd add a caveat, though, based on one of the other studies I was browsing last night. Yes, the rule of thumb is SAT = PSAT*10. But actual same-year SAT administrations tend to result in a band of likely scores where PSAT*10 is below the midpoint. So you probably ought to knock a few points off in the SAT-to-PSAT conversion.
Unfortunately for gifted students, the College Board discourages taking AP classes before 9th grade, even writing "The AP label cannot be affixed to courses and transcripts prior to 9th grade." What if a school district allowed a gifted 8th grader to take AP calculus alongside 12-graders?
I think it would be within the rules to show that on a transcript as Calculus, with no AP designation. Since you can take the exam without the classwork, there should be no issue there. And that kid's likely to have enough college-level coursework that the AP designation would have been meaningless, in any case.
AP coursework completed in 9th grade is not often deemed credible by the higher education community.
Bwahahaha. I read that as, "if all those pressure-cooker schools run their 8th graders through AP Bio, that sort of undermines our goal of convincing colleges that AP classes are equivalent to a first-year course at a well-regarded 4-year school."
In practice, I suspect that the <9th graders taking AP classes are either native speakers of tested foreign languages (sanctioned by the CB), or individually tutored.
