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Years ago as a college freshman I was taking my first calculus course. Another freshman skipped it because he had calculus in Advanced Placement in high school. I mentioned we were learning the limit definition of a derivative $$ \lim_{\Delta x\to 0} \frac{f(x+\Delta x) -f(x)}{\Delta x}$$ and he didn't know what I was talking about.
Maybe I misunderstood (I hope I did!). But is it even possible to teach calculus without this? If so is that common in AP classes?
The definition of a limit, and of the derivative in terms of a limit, are standard material that should be covered in all freshman calculus classes. A student who is never exposed to these definitions is being shortchanged educationally.
Realistically, however, very few students in this type of class are intellectually capable of understanding these definitions or of doing even the most trivial epsilon-delta proofs, although they may understand the general concept at some more vague level, like "if you make the deltas small, you get the derivative." They also tend to ignore this material or forget it because it is never used again once rules for differentiation are introduced.
The problem with skipping this material would be that if you have 10% of the class who are going to be math majors or who are intellectually capable of doing this material, then you're not serving them well.
It is possible to use other frameworks for calculus. It's relatively straightforward to do derivatives of polynomials without any fancy foundational definitions. This was done historically before Newton and Leibniz. I do this in sections 1.2.3-5 in my book Fundamentals of Calculus. However, it's hard to use this approach to get off the ground with differentiation rules and derivatives of transcendental functions. That's what Newton and Leibniz accomplished. Until about 1900, students in the English-speaking world learned calculus using Newton's fluxions, and others learned it using Leibniz's infinitesimals. Infinitesimals were given a more secure logical foundation by Abraham Robinson and others ca. 1950 in non-standard analysis, and something similar can be done using nonclassical logic. The best-known freshman calc text to use NSA is one by Keisler, which is free online these days. For previous discussion of this, see Would teaching nonstandard calculus in an introduction calculus course make it easier to learn? .
As a new AP Calculus teacher who just went through the certification process with College Board, I can expand on Ben Crowell's answer. Not only is it pretty irresponsible to teach introductory calculus without this formal definition of the limit, but such a course would not be allowed to call itself "AP Calculus AB" on student transcripts. Teachers and principals agree to follow the posted syllabus even when it covers material that is not covered on the Calculus AB exam.
But the formal limit definition of derivatives is material that definitely is covered on the Calculus AB exam. For instance, a student may be asked to calculate $$\lim_{x\to e}\frac{\ln x-1}{x-e}$$ without a calculator and should be able to apply the difference quotient definition to see that this is $f'(e)$ where $f(x)=\ln x$ and understand from there that the limit is $1/e$ in a few seconds.
Rate of change definition of derivative is still covered as part of AP calculus. (Your question is actually "someone told me something that sounded strange" and...well...yes, you were to think it sounded strange.)
See the official description of the AP course:
https://apcentral.collegeboard.org/courses/ap-calculus-bc/course
[In particular, see the second link on that page, a pdf document that gives an overview of the course and shows coverage of the rate of change limit definition of a derivative.]
The next question (that you didn't ask, but some people are interested to discuss) is what about epsilon-delta proofs. Those are very lightly covered in BC calculus. And arguably have been rather lightly covered for a long time in traditional engineering school calculus courses. But that's actually not what you asked about.
Disclaimer: At first, I want to highlight that I am not familiar with AP Calculus and the corresponding syllabus, so I will cover solely the mathematical dimension of this question.
So, teaching calculus without limits, in general, means the you have at hand some other means of talking about approximations etc. The only way that comes to my mind to do so is by using infinitesimals - i.e. positive quantities $\varepsilon$ such that $\varepsilon<x$ for any real $x>0$.
So, using this and standard parts of hyperreal numbers, one may define the derivative of a function as follows:
The derivative of a function $f$ at some point $a\in D_f$ is defined as the standard part of the following hyperreal: $$\frac{f(x+dx)-f(x)}{dx},$$ whenever this standard part exists/has sense.
However, I find it mostly improbable that this was the one preferred in an introductory calculus class. However, one may "define" a notion as e.g. the derivative, procedurally by describing the way one may find a functions derivative - in terms of algebraic manipulations.
For instance, one way to do so is to take some $h\neq0$ and then calculate the rate of change fraction:
$$\frac{f(x+h)-f(x)}{h}.$$
Then, once the above fraction has been simplified enough, by setting $h=0$ - just to avoid to mention any limits - you get the so wanted derivative.
Even if the above approach has several - and from my viewpoint, enormous - faults in terms of sacrificing mathematical rigour in favour of a more procedural understanding, it still seems to me the only "reasonable" way in which one may avoid mentioning limits in a calculus class.
