[bsder]

It's called Advanced Placement.

You can rack up quite a lot of credits with AP courses.

As an engineer, I wiped out all my English requirements (6 credits). I wiped out Chemistry (6 credits and a really annoying lab at 4 credits). And I wiped out my first Calc class (4 credits). I think I killed a foreign language requirement, too (probably 6 credits).

That's 30 credits--or, a full year.

The big problem was that I was feeding into engineering which really doesn't let you wipe a lot out--knocking off Chemistry was a big deal (I also had an AP History score which didn't do anything for me, for example). Generally, all your good science scores just let you switch to a "more researchy" track where you take "deeper theoretical" (read: a shitton more work) classes.