[xanmas]

I'm not entirely sure if I agree, in my experience. For my courses in AP Chem, Phys, Calc AB, BC, Compsci A, AB, and Stats, my courses in high school were good enough that I understood 90+% of what was learned in the intro classes at my uni to the point where I was easily able to tutor for beer money without issue. The one caveat is that my HS didn't put a serious focus on labs so when I got to uni, I was required to take my intro Chem and Phys labs. It would be nice if labs took a more significant role in AP courses as labs are precisely where we see the experimental justification for the facts that we learned.

For my AP humanities courses (APUSH, WHAP, APEng III, IV, etc), I'd tend to agree with the author in that those courses were largely a hurried survey with lots of busy work and perhaps not on par with what I could have take at my uni. This concern was ancillary to me as I went into university knowing that I wanted to double major in physics and mathematics so being essentially exempt from my humanities core allowed me to take 18 upper division math courses and 19 upper division physics.

I guess my conclusion is that the AP programme is good when used with an ultimately end goal in mind and, in a lot of cases, provides near identical treatment of materials, especially in the hard sciences.