Is AP Seminar Worth it?

I had another post for my senior schedule but basically it boils down to my English course.

I can choose one among:
-AP Seminar
-College Research Writing Honors (similar just honors and longer papers)
-Half years: Honors World Lit and Honors Modern Poetry —>If B avg or better semester 1, can skip midterms! :slight_smile:

Already have 3 APs but I have a study hall for one period, and two days out of the four rotation days I have an extra.

AP Seminar is basically writing and research papers (1,000+ words) with exam ones up to 2,000 words and team over 3,000 words I believe and class presentations. It’s new if you’ve never heard of it before. It is a lot of work.

I’m just conflicted because fall sports and college apps and on top of everything else will this be too much to handle?
I want to get the research paper writing experience. But I also don’t want to have a crazy courseload. Right now I have 2 APs and others are “easy” honors.

Thanks for responding!

@penngirlpending
Kinda late but hope this helps:

Ap seminar is definitely worth it in the long run because it helps you many ways such as getting better and more comfortable at public speaking and effectively writing research papers which I assume will be very prominent in college. As for the workload, in my experience we have had weeks where the course has been very heavy loaded with work and then whole months where we have barely had any work. It definitely depends on your teacher and how they structure the course but ultimately your main goals throughout the school year are finishing the two tasks which are:
Task 1 : group paper, individual paper, and presentation.
Task 2 : individual paper and presentation.
Outside of these things there was very minimal work. If you are organized and don’t procastinate too much, you will breeze through this course. Oh and of course there is task 3, which is the ap exam but the preparation for that is the research paper skills u develop from the other tasks and honestly imo it was pretty easy.

Thank you so much @Penguin007! It’s really hard to seek out people who’ve taken the course because it is so new. I’ve already submitted in my list and I chose to take it. I’m more confident now in my choice thanks to you!

Tbh I didn’t like AP seminar very much, and I would have rather taken AP psychology because it seemed really interesting, but this year is the first year that our school had AP seminar and they said if we don’t take it we can’t take AP world so we were kinda forced into it and then I didn’t have room left for AP psych cuz it took the spot, so yeah, im salty about ap seminar.

But anyway, rant done, you might like it!! You get to read a ton of diverse articles and stuff, so you might find those interesting

This is a problem that I have with the whole AP Capstone program. While conceptually, the ideas are fine, I don’t see how this is considered AP. More to the point, it seems that colleges can’t figure it out either, since relatively few give credit for it.

For some reason, though, some HS’s have drunk the AP Kool-Aid. However, the carrot and stick approach that some of these schools are using to pad the course is really a turn-off for me, and makes me question if these schools are really acting in the students’ best interests.

My rant off. :slight_smile:

For the OP, one other thing to consider: AP Seminar is not considered an English course for UC’s admission, but rather a College-Preparatory Elective (“g”). So if you are applying to a UC, you need to make sure you meet the English requirements.

@skieurope
That may be true but out of the options that OP laid out, ap seminar does seem the best option. Also because it is relatively new (we’re talking 2 years), it’s expected not to be well established among many colleges similar to the New Sat. Despite this there are many schools interested in the capstone program, there’s a list of them on the collegeboard site.

Btw, in my school we were required to take AP language with seminar but I had no problems with that because I was going to take it anyways and the two classes tie very closely with each other.