AP Seminar: Who is she and is she right for me?

This year at East Rockaway, 10th graders were offered the chance to take a new class – AP Seminar. This class replaced the normal English 10 class and gave students a chance to earn college credit in their Sophomore year. Now that the AP Seminar test has come and passed, I thought I’d tell you all about it to help future students make an informed decision on whether they want to take the class. 

AP Seminar is a mostly writing based course. The course consists of three main assignments: The IRR, the IWA and the end of year exam. You get a lot of liberty while writing the essays for this class. Most of the essay options let you choose what you write about. Let me explain assignment as you’ll complete them throughout the school year.

IRR:

The IRR and TMP are the first 2 things you’ll complete in this class. In groups of 3 to 5, you will work together to research and solve any issue of your choice. In the individual research report (IRR), you write about the issue through your lens using 10 peer-reviewed sources. I know it sounds like a lot, but while writing you’ll realize the more sources you have the better. I found myself always looking for more sources to get more information or different perspectives. The essay is 1,200 words. This sounds like a lot but you’ll realize while writing that it is very easy to go over the word limit. Once all of your teammates finish their essays, you will compile your research to create three solutions to the original problem. Your team will then work together on a slide show and presentation arguing the best solution. This is the team multimedia presentation (TMP).

IWA:

The IWA and IMP are very similar to the IRR and TMP. The only difference is that you’re presenting by yourself and you have a stimulus packet to help create your essay idea. College Board sends out a 7-piece stimulus packet in January for AP Seminar students to use when creating their next argument essay. Working alone, you need to connect at least two texts to come up with an issue and solution to that issue. The individual written argument (IWA) involves explaining the issue and why it’s a problem and one solution or one way to stop it. Then, just like with the IRR, you will create an individual multimedia presentation to convey your issue and solution.

AP Exam:

Lastly is the end of year exam. The end of year exam consists of two parts: EOC A and EOC B. The EOC A has you read one article and answer three questions. The first is to determine the author’s main argument. The second is to explain his line of reasoning and the third is to decide if the argument is credible or not. They estimate this should take about 30 minutes, but if you go over by like 10-15 minutes, it shouldn’t affect you that much. EOC B gives you four pieces of evidence to connect in order to create an original argument. You need to find a connection between at least two pieces of evidence to create an original argument. It’s estimated you should take 90 minutes on this part. The whole test is two hours with no break. 

Overall:

Overall, the class wasn’t that hard. We’ll see how my AP score reflects how I feel, but I think I did really well. The workload wasn’t that much. It felt like a lot at the moment, but looking back, it was easy to manage and complete. I highly recommend this class to any 9th grader for next year. It ended up being fun sometimes and we had a fun celebration after the test. Don’t just take it from me. Erin Lynch, 10th grader stated, “I felt that my writing has improved over the course of the class through the many research papers and presentations. I think this will help me with future high school and college assignments.”