<p>It really depends on the RIGOUR of your dual-enrollment courses. Ideally, in the courses you take, your classmates (save for any fellow high school students) should be at least 3-4 years older than you, unless you're dual-enrolling at a high-quality school (not necessarily highly-ranked) or have some other way of confirming that your classmates will be your intellectual equals (you usually can feel their attitudes). It is also better if you can find a way to dual-enroll at a state university instead.</p>
<p>You do NOT want to attend a college writing course to find that a good portion of your classmates in the community college have no real passion to learn, talk about how much they want to party this weekend, and are the type of people content with C's, etc. </p>
<p>If you're choosing mathematics courses, less-than-bright "peers" is more tolerable, (I've been there) since the course will depend less on feedback and discussion with your peers.</p>
<p>Courses I recommend dual-enrolling for:</p>
<p>Mathematics courses your school doesn't offer (linear algebra, multivariable calc, etc.) This will be great for you and the school you're applying to, as you are pursuing courses beyond the HS curriculum;</p>
<p>Mathematics courses your school offers but for which dual-enrolling college might offer greater rigour;</p>
<p>Language courses equivalent to a fifth year in a language (for high school) or higher -- this usually equates to about 3rd/4th year for college-level langauges; lower level courses for other languages can be good (both to the school and you) if they are for languages that are relatively understudied, such as Sanskrit, Arabic, etc. </p>
<p>Classes in computer science, since these tend to be better than most HS computer science courses; </p>
<p>High-level courses (200/300+ or up) are always encouraging, except for language courses (since it's easy to attain the college equivalent of a 200/300 of a language course in high school). </p>
<p>BE WARY OF:</p>
<p>A lot of science courses -- for no reason than you'll be usually unable to take the lab component without the lecture, or vice versa, and often they tend to be held in different parts of the day -- such as when you are still physically in the high school building, for instance. If you can take all the components of a science course, then go for it, although again I caution you to watch out for rigour (ensure that your course will be as rigourous or more rigourous than the AP course you are replacing). </p>
<p>Most "English" courses, as these tend to be lacking in rigour compared to both the AP English language exams, unless again there are other ways of ascertaining the course's rigour, e.g. they are highly-levelled. (Even so, the good courses tend to be highly specialised as "rhetoric", "literary devices", and so forth; these are good to take, but they won't replace an AP exam; other acceptable courses are linguistics-related courses such as phonology, the historical linguistics of a certain language, and so forth.) </p>
<p>Any supposed design or "engineering"-related courses that don't use calculus-level math or higher</p>
<p>Any classes for which you can tell your classmates are obviously not going to be your intellectual equals, even though they may be older </p>
<p>Encouraging signs of rigour are situations like when your own teachers mention they have studied under the professor who would teach your course (for example, a teacher who grew up in my town but went to Duke mentioned that he's studied under two of my professors who taught some of my courses, a decade ago though), or when other students complain how a certain professor is a really hard grader; when the professor teaching your course is actually retired but teaching emeritus; when you hear other people (such as another HS teacher) speak well of your professor's work. Then you should be encouraged.</p>