<p>To put it in perspective, a typical 4-credit college course over a semester is supposed to take about 12 hours per week (in and out of class) over 15 weeks, for a total of 180 hours (in and out of class). However, actual college workloads are probably only about 2/3 of that, or 8 hours per week (in and out of class), for a total of 120 hours.</p>
<p>If an AP course is equivalent to a year long sequence of courses (e.g. calculus BC in one year for students who just completed precalculus), then it can be expected to be about 240 hours of work total. If it is equivalent to just a semester long course (e.g. a lot of AP courses like calculus AB, statistics, chemistry, each half of physics C, world history, human geography, psychology, etc.), then it can be expected to be about 120 hours of work total. Of course, some AP courses attempt to emulate what are ordinarily considered easy college courses (e.g. statistics, human geography, psychology), so they would be even less work.</p>
<p>You can then divide the number of hours of work in these estimates by the number of days of instruction at the high school to get an estimate of the amount of time per day (in and out of class) the student may be expected to spend on an AP course.</p>
<p>Re: IB</p>
<p>Seems that IB is commonly reported to be a lot more workload, although not necessarily that much more learned in terms of what colleges are willing to give credit for.</p>