The AP Capstone program consists of AP Seminar and AP Research which combined allows students to earn the AP Capstone Diploma.

The AP Seminar class is a course that was introduced as an elective this year. As a sophomore balancing all core PAP and AP classes, I decided to take AP Seminar as an elective.

The first six weeks of this course consist of a mock Independent Research Report which was new to me, since freshman year only consisted of expository and persuasive essays. We were all taught to find reliable resources and come up with a viable research question that would drive our research.

After writing the Independent Research Report, I had to collaborate with other classmates to create a multimedia presentation which counted as a major grade. During this time, our group faced many conflicts due to everyone’s different style of writing. This was particularly frustrating to me due to the fact that everyone was very headstrong in getting it their way. However by learning how to accommodate everyone in our group, everyone got what they wanted, and the outcome of the presentation was very well.

The first six weeks was challenging for me since I had other classes to balance along with everything in this class. It was likely even more of an issue for juniors due to the fact that they frequently have balance not just one or two AP classes but several at once.

The second six weeks was more difficult because it required the students to write a 2,000 word essay based off a stimulus packet. The mock Independent Written Argument pushed almost everyone out of their comfort zone due to the amount of research that had to be put in. On top of that, all of this work was independent which required a lot more work than the first mock task. The amount of work that was put into this essay was very intensive which took days to complete. After finishing this essay, there was an individual multimedia presentation which was probably my least favorite aspect of the class. Students had to compress a 2,000 word essay into a 6-8 minute presentation. The second six weeks was probably by far the most difficult out of all grading periods.

Currently with the third six weeks over, we are working on the AP-graded Independent Research Report. This is a challenge for the students because we are not allowed to ask our teacher about our report. However we are working in groups which is helpful to a certain extent due to the fact that everyone has varying perspectives.This paper will also be a chunk of the fourth six weeks and will require collaborative work, once again.

In these past three six-weeks I have learned more about researching and writing research papers than I could imagine. AP seminar is time consuming and I would not recommend this course to students who already are balancing multiple PAP/ AP classes. The course work is very rigorous and without putting in effort, a student will not succeed in that class. However with the right time management skills and pursuing consistent effort, I would recommend this class to anyone. This class allows for students to explore a variety of research which is eye-opening and also provides students an outlook for how college essays are written.