Colleges normally have the expectation that high school graduates learned something in high school, though they should recognize that some high school graduates are more or less advanced than others. A sensible college would allow for different placement of entering students based on what they know from high school, so that students are neither overwhelmed by being in too advanced a course nor bored with wasting their time and tuition in a course that they already know well.
It looks like the college in question is one with such low admission standards that even its engineering students are usually unprepared to start in calculus 1, so that its norm is to start engineering students in precalculus (with some in even lower math), and that a student with a good AP calculus score is an extreme outlier.