> and you got a good taste of what a college course is like.
I did not take the AP chemistry exam and did not take any college level chemistry. I did take two years worth of AP English and earned college credits taking those exams. I also minored in English in college.
Overall, I found my college level English classes to be significantly less challenging than my high school AP classes. The AP classes were grueling but also worthwhile. Each week we wrote one to two essays in class following old AP prompts. Leading up to the exam we were writing three essays a week. In addition, we covered about three times the amount of literature that regular English classes at the same grade level covered while also having required summer reading and book reports due at the beginning of the school year.
The classes killed my interest in reading fiction and I have probably read less fiction in the last 15 years than I did during those two classes. On the other hand, I was surprised by how poor some of my peer's writing skills were when I started taking 300 and 400 level English classes in college. I was thankful for the AP classes when I saw how far behind some were.
I'm not the greatest writer. However, those classes, and the excellent teachers who taught them, gave me the ability to write. Before those classes I struggled to write the very few essays I was required to write. Afterwards, I churned out essays with ease while my peers struggled to meet the minimum essay length. The experience was one of my most important educational experiences.