The Dean offers advice on how a home-schooled student should choose HS classes. https://insights.collegeconfidential.com/homeschooled-admissions
In what sense are the SAT2 exams on the “chopping block” as you predict in your comment?
Without any standardized exams, how are colleges to determine academic ability and potential in an uniformly measurable way?
I suspect it means that Subject Tests have been recommended by fewer and fewer schools in the recent past, currently down to maybe a dozen or two. And they’re now truly optional at most of those. So many feel it’s quite likely they will be eliminated before long. I noted elsewhere that I expect Subject Tests to be discontinued in a few years - it’s in a race with the SAT Essay.
A vast, vast majority of colleges have been making decisions without Subject Tests for many years. Eliminating Subject Tests would be far from leaving a situation where Schools are “without any standardized exams”. SAT, ACT, and AP standardized tests are used way, way more than Subject Tests.
Seems like the main question was “My question is, for competitive colleges, what looks better — AP courses or classes at community college?”
As usual (whether home school or not), the answer depends on which specific courses at which community college versus which specific AP courses, and which colleges the student will eventually apply to.