Originally Posted by Bostonian
A few posters have complained that their children's high schools do not allow students to take AP classes before 11th grade, even if they are ready.

Anecdotal evidence for allowing qualified students to take AP classes before 11th grade:

http://news.ditd.org/July_12/eNews_July12_web.htm
Two American finalists were among the top winners at the second annual Google Global Science Fair! Grand prize winner Brittany Wenger won for the 17-18 age group after writing a computer program known as a neural network to help doctors diagnose breast cancer less invasively. The program will help detect patterns in a large database of breast tissue samples.

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In her acknowledgements https://sites.google.com/a/googlesc...b2eb41354-1333130785-87/acknowledgements , Brittany Wenger writes
"I would also like to acknowledge my A.P. Computer Science teacher, Mrs. Barrett. Before taking her class sophomore year, I programmed everything in C#. I am now confident in my java skills and have applied knowledge gained from her class to this project."

Her project also required knowledge of biology (of course) and statistics, regardless of whether she had taken AP courses in those subjects.