ORRHS Continues to Expand Advanced Placement

This upcoming school year, ORRHS will take a step towards better equipping students for the growing competitiveness of colleges and for their future careers. This advancement is being done by introducing the Advanced Placement Capstone program, which is aimed at preparing students for the material they will encounter in college.

Through this program, the school is adding the AP Research and AP Seminar courses into its academic line-up. It is aimed at increasing students’ abilities to collect, synthesize, and present information gathered from a variety of sources.

The two classes are each a year long, with AP Seminar being the first class students at ORRHS will take. English teachers Kathleen Brunelle and Megan Hall will be the instructors for the 45 sophomores and juniors enrolled in AP Seminar. (As it is a combined two-year course, members of this year’s senior class are not eligible to participate in the program.)

“The Seminar course is to get you to think like a college student, so there’s a lot of discussion,” Hall explained. “The idea is to narrow to a topic of interest for students to research the following year in AP Research.”

As an AP class, the course will include a combination of independent work and in-school research. For example, the Seminar students have a summer reading assignment that requires them to choose a potential research topic, read and annotate a nonfiction book, and to gather news articles relating to both national and international events.

“In addition to the AP exam in May, students will write two actual research papers and submit them to the AP for scoring,” said Hall.

The new AP classes benefit students at ORR in another way. If students take the AP Capstone courses along with four other AP classes (from any subject and taken in any year), and earn a score of a ‘3’ or higher on all of their AP exams, they will receive an AP Capstone Diploma. With this opportunity now available for the first time to ORR students, the school has now given them a chance to reach an even footing with those enrolled in International Baccalaureate (IB) courses.

Old Rochester Regional High School joins 650 schools nationwide that participate in the AP Capstone program, including Dartmouth High School and New Bedford High School.

By Jo Caynon

 

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