Whether or not you will transition adequately from high school to college academics depends mainly on the difficulty of your high school courses and how you approached them. You do not necessarily have to take AP courses, though I have heard that they do help, just to get a feel for college-level work; however, just hanging out and aceing easy tests in basic high school classes will not help you either. For example, I am a high school senior who has had a mixture of AP, actual college classes, and general education classes who worked very hard in his AP courses and learned a ton of knowledge. In contrast, I also took an average leveled chemistry course, which, at my high school, was where they put all the seniors that were at the highest risk of dropping out or were just going to get a diploma by the skin of their teeth (my high school has a very bad reputation for watering down courses just so students can pass); most of my classmates were very rude to our teacher, did not participate, etc... so the class was very basic and only covered up to thermodynamics. I gained very little insight on chemistry from that class because it was made to be easy and teach students how to pass a final exam and still keep a "D" ( I received an A mainly because I actually turned in work and the other tests were extremely easy), it was not constructed to instill the fundamentals of chemistry so that the student could pursue more indepth studies or understand basic topics in chemistry. I am currently reading a college level textbook on general chemistry in order to prepare myself for college so, if you have similiar classes make sure you are doing enough outside work to reinforce your understanding of those subjects; there are alot of good cheap workbooks out there that can help you drill concepts into your memory.
