Except the suggestion above means that you do have to sit through four years of English and then take the AP test to get a fifth, it doesn’t get you out of those four years. And you have to make one of those four years a regular “tedious” class.
Yes, to use it as a 5th year, a student still has to sit through 4 years of English classes (required in CA). I guess it boils down to personal preference. My kids did not enjoy English classes and wanted to minimize the amount of work they had to do for that subject. So they took and passed AP Lit/AP Lang exams to demonstrate AP level proficiency without taking the classes. They evidently were sufficiently prepared for Cal Poly, as they all made it through successfully. I honestly don’t know if they were actually awarded the bonus MCA points for extra semesters, but since the CSU Mentor online application allowed the 5th year to be entered as an AP test , we assumed that all 10 semesters were counted. Good luck to your daughter. 
An alternative option for obtaining the 5th year of English is to take a community college English class. This can also be a relatively efficient option as 1 semester of a community college course counts as a full year of an Honors/AP class on CSU Mentor. My youngest actually chose to take a CC English class (1 night per week for one semester) instead of a high school English class his senior year (with approval from his high school). The class was for dual credit and was transferrable to Cal Poly.