I have to say that whatever I have written here on this is based on the current trend of declining scholarship and viewing AP classes through a prism that shows them as 6-8 years away.
Obviously HK has had very good success with her daughter taking AP classes and she has the benefit of experience with AP classes.
I don't think that AP classes should be college level (to me in shows the remedial level of some colleges) because I think college should be harder and that ideally an AP will at least prepare a kid for the rigours of an academic college. Perhaps this is why universities like MIT do not give credit form them.
The point about learning to suck it up, produce and develop EF is well taken. I never got this as a kid and I saw my DD learning stuff so fast that she was not seeing learning as something that needed to be worked at.
This is why I have put her into an AoPs class - it is way more rigourous than anything she has done before. She gets it and understands how to do the 'challenge problems' but there is a lot of text to cover, especially in the worked examples. The first couple of weeks were a chore but she is now adjusting and needing a lot less time to go through the book work and do the problems. So far, the experiment is yielding the expected results!
If AP classes do maintain their rigour then I will encourage my DD to take some but somehow I do not see them on a trajectory that is climbing in that regard.
