There's a lot of disagreement here, but my experience was similar. AP calculus 1 translated into absolutely nothing at my college (this was about a decade ago);

There's a lot of disagreement here, but my experience was similar. AP calculus 1 translated into absolutely nothing at my college (this was about a decade ago); my peers who succeeded at testing out wound up failing higher level math classes with heavy calculus components. A friend of mine came in with AP computer science; during his campus visit the CS prof he met with basically said "if you test out of CS 111 I'll fail you in CS 122." My friend was astonished by the statement, but after taking CS 111 understood what he meant: the AP class was worth just a few weeks of the college class it was supposedly equivalent to. AP classes probably vary as widely as high school and college classes, but it certainly throws another variable into the equation. If you lose the gamble, you wind up retaking whatever the next class in the sequence is plus the class you were testing out of, for a net loss compared to not doing any AP. If AP worked as advertised, that simply shouldn't happen.