Concerning AP Capstone

Date: 2 Jun 2022

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This post originally appeared on Blog 2.0

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This is, my credo, the most salutary set of AP courses you can take, especially if you plan on doing research in college or beyond. Capstone is hard—hard not in that it involves difficult content—but because it requires gigantic time investment if you want to do it well.

Other APs, however fancy they sound, teach you mostly facts, maybe some connection with other subjects, maybe some disciplinary practices, maybe some critical thinking, but nothing compares to AP Capstone that teaches you how to approach fact.

I would say that, the further you go with your academic career, the less you’ll find what you do similar to classes like AP Physics or AP Language, but the more you find what you’re doing similar to Capstone.

Yes, maybe a 5 on AP Calculus makes your application look good, but it doesn’t really help your paper look good when you’re in college.

Last summer, I was working with a PhD student on an NLP research project. Guess what, research was what mattered. AP Computer Science had no use there.

AP Capstone isn’t a course, it’s a diploma awarded if you get all of the following:

• 3 or higher on AP Seminar
• 3 or higher on AP Research
• 3 or higher on 4 other AP exams

Which, if you can score 3 or higher on Seminar and Research, I don’t think the other ones would be a problem.

Do note that the Capstone Diploma is awarded after you pass the AP Research exam. So if you want to show a Capstone Diploma to college when you apply, you need to start taking AP Seminar in 10th grade and AP Research in 11th grade.

I took AP Research in 12th grade, so I only wrote “AP Capstone Candidate” on my application.

AP Seminar is somewhat similar to the research you do for English class, except you do it in a much more academic way. Maybe you cite three websites for your argumentative essay in 10th grade English or a few research papers if you do AP Lang, but in AP Seminar, you might want to cite 20 or even 30, most of which are academic journals, not websites.

The topics for your research are more or less guided, and your research are all based on academic sources you find, this means you don’t need to go out in the wild and count how many elephants you see (well… probably that’s not what you are doing for AP Research either but that’s what you could do to get first hand data).

AP Seminar may seem very difficult at first: the piles of academic sources you have to read already look very scary, not to mention synthesising compelling writings therefrom. At the early stage of AP Seminar class, you will be taught how to read complex sources, analyse how authors develop their argument, and how to craft your own argument. All of these are done in preparation for your upcoming research projects.

I feel like that AP Seminar tries to let you experience a wide range of different things. For example, you have:

• Source analysis - this is when you read academic sources and try to understand what it’s saying.
• Annotated bibliography - this is when you write comments about the list of sources you read as part of your research; each annotation can include a summary of the source, evaluation of its credibility, thoughts on how you want to use the source, connections to other sources you’ve read, etc.
• Connecting perspectives - you’ll often find that different sources say different things about your topic of interest. By connecting these papers, you might find how they interact with each
• Group work - You will have a team project as your first performance task. You will be working with a team of 3-4 people to choose a common topic and present about it. However, you are not going to research collaboratively. Instead, each person is going to look at the topic from a different lens. But you are going to bring the different lenses together when you do your presentation.
• Individual papers - You write and submit two papers to College Board, one is a report related to your team’s topic, the other is an argument based on a stimulus packet.
• Presentations - You do two presentations in total, one with your team and one on your own. This is when you talk to the audience about your research and answer questions
• End of Course Exam (EOC) - You will have a paper exam like other AP exams. It makes up 45% of your score. The exam is about analysing sources and synthesising information, the research routine you do anyway. In my opinion, this is easier than writing your full research paper, but it’s the time limit that makes it hard

There are lots of acronyms being thrown around in AP Seminar. Understanding the AP Seminar vocabulary might help to better understand the course.

• Performance Task 1 - This is the team + individual hybrid research project that you will do. It makes up 30% of your final score
  • IRR (Individual Research Report) - A 1,200 words paper reporting what you find about your team’s research question through your lens.
  • TMP (Team Multimedia Presentation) - A 10 minutes presentation you do with your team combining findings from all of your IRRs.
  • Oral defence - Your teacher is going to each team member one question about your research process to see if you really “did proper research with proper collaboration”.
• Performance Task 2 - This accounts for 35% of your total score
  • The stimulus packet - College Board gives you a pile of sources (could be papers or articles or images or whatever) that you have to relate your research question to. In a sense you develop your research question based on common themes you see in this packet.
  • IWA (Individual Written Argument) - A 2,000 words argument written on your own.
  • IMP (Individual Multimedia Presentation) - A 8 mins presentation about your IWA.
  • Oral defence - Similar to the oral defence in performance task 1, except that you are now answering 3 questions on your own
• EOC (End of Course Exam) - The final paper exam that make up 45% of your total score.

This when you spend one year doing real research. By real research I mean research where you actually go and try to answer an unsolved question by collecting new data and forming new understanding.

I feel like that AP Research is actually quite flexible. In fact you can have any research question as long as it’s meaningful. Social science in general seems to be the most accessible option since it’s easy to survey people, but I’ve seen people researching chemistry and making electronics. Those are probably more difficult if your school don’t provide resources like labs.

Personally, I’ve been researching computer science this year, more specifically I looked at computer vision, a field that uses AIs to process visual data. It was a very outlying decision, but I had lots of fun researching something I like. There was lots of writing code and implementing my experiments, something you wouldn’t experience if you’re just doing AP Seminar.

The AP Research exam is more relaxed than AP Seminar, I feel. It only has two parts:

• The paper - You are in this course to write a 5,000 words paper. This paper includes everything like literature review, methodology, results, and analysis. This accounts for 75% of your score
• Presentation - You get 20 minutes to talk about your research and answer oral defence questions. You get 25% of your final score from this.

As said, these are not easy courses, so do be careful when you sign up for them. Here are the things that I think you’ll need if you want to have a good experience in AP Capstone.

• Strong English - You’re going to be reading tons of papers. It becomes very difficult if you don’t understand the language of what you’re reading. While it might be that you encounter very technical papers you don’t understand, but not understanding the English is another thing.
• Research Skill - This is what powers research (duh)
  • Citations - You have to know how to do this. I reckon that you’re probably familiar with MLA, but MLA is just one of the many citation formats! In AP Capstone, you might need to use APA or even weird ones like IEEE (which I used for computer science). You’re my already know how to use NoodleTools for citations, but I recommend Zotero.
  • Reading papers - The sources you’re going to read are going to be very dense. And I suppose that you don’t want to read everything since it’s going to be just too much, so you will have to learn how to read your sources selectively.
  • Keeping track of information - when you’re dealing with 30 sources you’re going to need a way to keep track of what you have read, otherwise you might end up not finding the information you need. There are many ways to do this personally I tried using physical note cards and it worked, but I recommend experimenting with different ways to take notes.

• Stress level - If you are doing AP Seminar, you will have lots of paper to write. And sometimes you’ll have to do this with all the other things that you have going on and it’s going to be very overwhelming. I will say that before you take the class, you need to be aware of how much time we have available for this and how you are going to prioritise and make sure that you don’t end up burning yourself.
• Procrastination - This is the biggest enemy. You can cram an AP in one day and get a 5, but you can’t read 30 papers and produce a proper research paper in one day.
• Motivation - In my opinion, motivation is the key to making progress in any form of research. When I’m motivated, I find that I’m less stressed about deadlines and less likely to procrastinate.

The benefit is life long. You research in college. If you are like me who plan to get a PhD, maybe you research for your whole life.

You get recognitions from college too. CMU, for example, gives me the highest credit for 5s on both AP Seminar and AP Research out of all the 16 APs I’ve taken.

It’s going to cost you time, and it’s going to be a big sacrifice if you have other things you want to spend time doing. If you do commit to AP Capstone, expect less sleep.

It has a high demand on English. If you are not a native speaker, you probably want to make sure that your English level is able to facilitate research. However, weak in English doesn’t mean weak in research, it’s just that AP Capstone is done in English.

You might be dithering between between AP Lang and AP Seminar. I took both, so I can tell you want I think.

AP Lang is like a baby AP Seminar combined with some high school English and some SAT reading. AP Seminar covers most of the argument analysis stuff AP Lang other than the literary use of English, but AP Lang teaches you almost nothing about research. AP Lang does have MCQs similar to those in SAT reading. To be honest, I don’t think sitting through AP Language’s SAT style multiple choice questions help my life in any way.

Dropping out After AP Seminar?

Yes, some people decide to not take AP Research after taking AP Seminar. I considered that option too, but I didn’t end up ditching Research. I think it’s the right choice for me. AP Research is much more fun than AP Seminar if you like your research question.

If you really put research into your own hands, AP Research is really a playground for you to use what you learned in AP Seminar.

It’s not about rigidness, it’s about flexibility: you are building a sound line of reasoning, not checking checklists and putting everything in there. Really think and make yourself a scholar and writer, not a student trying to complete an assignment.

It’s not about exam skill when it comes to AP Capstone, it’s about solid research ability. Know thy purpose. This course is about research, not about knowing facts nor choosing right answers. Your approach should therefore be very different from other APs.

Focus. Learning to Deep Work is a really great to drive research work. When you are in flow state, you can finish writing a paper in a few hours non stop. (Inject Feb IRR2 journal entry)

Love drives research. If you don’t research to find out something you want to find out, it’s going to be hard.

Yes. Being a real researcher is the most straightforward way to ace AP Capstone. Look at how real researchers research. So far, the I would say that the single most helpful thing I came across regarding research is How to Take Smart Notes - Book by Sonke Ahrens. It’s a perfect complement to AP Seminar, in my opinion. It helped me to get rid of the idea that AP Seminar is some tedious high school assignment and start embracing research as a spontaneous process. I strongly recommend giving it a read (or maybe you can read my summary in the appendix?). Here’s a quote for you.

“Routines requires simple, repeatable tasks that can become automatic and fit together seamlessly. Only when all the related work becomes part of an overarching and interlocked process, where all bottlenecks are removed, can significant change take place.”

Recommended Resources

• The book How to Take Smart Notes by Sönke Ahrens
• My summary of How to Take Smart Notes - Book by Sonke Ahrens
• Zotero is my go-to citation manager
• Get a pile of index cards if you want to take literature notes by hand
• MarginNote is great if you want to read and annotate your papers digitally
• Practical Research - Planning and Design