How early to start working on college credits?

[dfrecore]

A high schooler who does well in school should take CLEP U.S. History 1 and 2 as soon as those high school history courses are finished. Take the exams while the material is fresh. The reality is that academic core courses or general education courses or whatever you want to call them are not the courses you want to take in college. They are mostly weed out courses. Not taking these courses in college isn't missing out on anything.

I would recommend that they take the AP exam rather than the CLEP exams - AP is more widely accepted, so I would always tell a HS student to take the AP exam rather than CLEP if that was a possibility.