Most Advanced Placement (AP) Seminar students believe the class is more difficult and time-consuming than they were initially told.
Last year, the current sophomores and juniors were given a presentation providing an overview of AP Seminar, including its overall difficulty, content, and techniques that would be utilized in the course.
Students were also told that there would be minimal homework, as most of the class is dedicated to work time.
However, this is not the case because classes are mainly lecture-based. In AP Seminar, the class time is solely dedicated to the lesson at hand and classwork on occasion. Usually, there isn’t a time set aside for students to complete or work on their homework.
Many students claim that the course was marketed as an easy class and, therefore, expected the course to be significantly easier than other AP classes.
“It is extremely different from what they marketed to us last year as it is significantly more difficult and rigorous. The homework takes a significant amount of time from my day,” said Amanda Kerby, a sophomore at Carlmont taking AP Seminar.
AP Seminar is particularly challenging because the assignments are time-consuming and mentally demanding. Many of the instructions are difficult to grasp, and the tasks require careful attention to detail.
“AP Seminar homework takes up the bulk of my daily workload and often requires me to work late into the night. On nights leading to an assignment due date, it frequently results in the sacrifice of sleep,” said Coco Tomita, a sophomore at Carlmont taking AP Seminar.
If the workload in AP Seminar stays the same, it will continue to affect students’ sleep schedules and their lives outside of school.
The heavy assignments and tight deadlines often force students to sacrifice sleep, leading to increased stress. This makes it harder for them to enjoy social activities and hobbies and care for themselves, disrupting students’ balance between school and personal life.
A big part of this newfound difficulty stems from the fact that AP Seminar is now open to sophomores instead of being exclusively for juniors and seniors.
“If I were a sophomore in AP Seminar, I would have viewed it as more difficult than when I took it as a junior because AP Seminar requires a different writing convention than what is typically taught in an English class,” said Jared Rodriguez, a senior at Carlmont taking AP Research.
Although many students have noticed changes to the AP Seminar course predominantly regarding in-class work time and the inclusion of sophomores, practically all other aspects of the class remain the same. The concepts, evaluations, and AP tests ultimately have maintained the same level of difficulty in recent years.
