The presence of AP doesn’t necessarily prove one is better prepared for college, especially considering quality of AP instruction varies greatly between high schools and instructors and AP courses are not always comparable to its supposedly equivalent actual college class.
One case I’m personally familiar with was an older college classmate who was floundering in a social science major related to history because despite receiving a 5 on APUSH from a respectable mid-Atlantic boarding school, he had so many gaps in US History knowledge that I had to give him a crash tutoring course so he could avoid crashing and burning in his major courses. He would not have had such gaps if he had taken our college’s US history survey courses.
Had an older cousin who graduated as an engineering major from with a cumulative GPA ten-thousandth of a point below 3.0. Caused him serious issues landing his first engineering related job in an era when most of his classmates already received job offers as early as the second-half of their junior year.
However, after working for a few years, his work experience ameliorated the effects of his mediocre GPA to the point he was admitted to several EE Masters programs on his employer’s dime. Ended up finishing his MSEE with only one grade below -A(It was a B+) from Tufts and he did it without having to pay for the vast majority of it*.
- He did have to pay 20% of the cost of that one course for which he received that B+.