At our HS if you pay the $300 you get college credit, if you don’t you just get high school credit. Either way the course appears on the high school transcript and is weighted like an AP course when they figure out the ranking. My kid took a linear algebra course only for high school credit, but got placed into an appropriate level math class in college. I don’t think he got college credit, but since the course sequencing made it difficult to graduate early, it hardly mattered. If a college puts their name on the course (and it’s the same at our high school - the credits are from Syracuse), I think you can assume that the midterms and finals are the same as what you would get at the university. It’s possible that it will meet more often, or that they will structure the course slightly differently, but in the end the students should know the same material.