The core curriculum will not allow engineers to graduate early. There is a core (major) sequence that is followed for each semester through 6 semesters after declaring major (end of frosh yr). So, you need to take I believe it is a total of 6 humanities courses across 4 yrs with 2 of those in same area. APs can only account for 2 of those electives. If you skip the freshman yr, to lighten the load and adjust to college, that is fine, lots of kids do that. They can also just use the extra room in the schedule to take a PE course for fun and to destress. The humanities course could also be the one that is the easiest in the schedule - give the brain a break from science/math and do something left-brain. The intro engineering course is programming mainly. So if they have a background, that is an easy course but if they don’t, it still isn’t as difficult as physics. They are all pretty demanding courses. I had two kids start at calc3 and they did fine with using those AP credits, one kid also placed out of chem and that was fine.