Then it's a college course. In my day and age :-) we took a course in the subject, took the exam, and that gave us the credit so we didn't have to take the college course.

It sounds like in your school you take a course, take the exam and then take another "standardized" college course which gives you credit; our regular high school courses use to prepare us for the exam which was all that was needed for the credit.

We didn't have anything that was standardized; our AP courses were made up by our school/county and hopefully prepared students to get an A or B on the test so they'd get the college credit; you just had to be a "good" student to get into the AP course. Now it sounds like the colleges have gotten together and said, okay, you have to pass the test to get into the college-level course which will then give you credit, kind of standardizing it a bit more.