I think it just depends on the student. Contrary to many posters, we've had a great experience with AP classes at our local HS. It offers 23 official AP courses (audited by AP), although those can lead to more than 23 AP tests (for example, studio art can be customized for the 2D, 3D or drawing AP). Both my dds found that many were just as difficult as the classes they encountered in college; when older dd had to retake introductory biology, because that was her major, she felt that it was easy compared to her AP Bio class. We liked AP classes because of the peers. In our area, the gifted/smart kids gravitate towards AP classes as a rule, and the more average students take the community college classes, although I'm sure there are exceptions. DS will take his first AP course next year in 9th grade (AP World History) and I envision about 10 overall. Too much would be if he couldn't continue to do running, music, chess, math, etc... in addition to schoolwork, or when he feels stressed out. But what we found was that these classes were not necessarily a ton more work; they were just the right level. And as far as the weighting/college "game"- well, yeah, we do play that. We've got four kids who need college tuition. As far as we can tell, colleges are still paying a LOT of attention to test scores and GPA. One dd got full tuition and the other got nearly half (and finished in 3 years), in part due to AP/GPA/test scores. Now they are out of school and debt free, so again, I'd like to ignore that stuff, but in our case, it definitely helped!
