In high school hallways, May 15 mornings always feel a little off. Half asleep, clutching water bottles and graphing calculators that have seen better days, students arrive earlier than usual. Some people don’t talk. Some make nervous jokes about nitrogen cycles and ecosystems. By eight in the morning, they are waiting for the start of the AP Environmental Science exam while sitting in front of laptops with the Bluebook app glowing back at them. Even though thousands of schools perform this little ritual, most students entering it are unaware of what they are about to encounter.
Two hours and forty minutes are allotted for the exam. Until you actually sit through it, that seems doable. You have ninety minutes to complete the eighty multiple-choice questions in Section I, or slightly more than a minute per question. You have seventy minutes to complete three free-response questions in Section II, and the math is harder than it seems. Now that everything is entirely digital and automatically submitted via Bluebook, one worry is eliminated while another is introduced. The margins are not scribbled. No more turning pages the old-fashioned way.
The structure of the multiple-choice portion is what makes it intriguing. Certain questions are self-contained; if you are familiar with the subject, you can respond to them in a matter of seconds. Others are composed of short text passages, charts, maps, or data tables. Of those sets, three or four heavily rely on quantitative data—graphs that require close examination. Three or four deal with qualitative content, such as representations or models. Two sets draw from sources that are text-based. This format is intended to assess students’ ability to think critically about the science rather than merely memorize it. A lot of preparation goes awry when it comes to that distinction.
Scores are secretly determined during the free-response portion. The first question asks students to design an investigation, which seems simple until you consider how simple it is to overlook a control or a variable. The second question challenges you to evaluate an environmental issue and suggest a fix. The Rule of 70, half-life, dimensional analysis, and other computations that penalize those who haven’t practiced under pressure are all included in question three. Careful writers typically outperform memorizers in this area, which accounts for 40% of the score.
Speaking with instructors who have taught this course for years, it seems that the digital format has altered the exam’s rhythm in ways that the College Board doesn’t fully promote. In the past, students would circle back after flagging questions. They now move through screens more quickly, but it’s also more confusing. Some students claim to have extra time after finishing. Some claim that before they even process the second FRQ prompt, the clock runs out. Depending on how well a person has internalized the seven science practices that the exam keeps returning to, both could be true.
When combined, the nine content units—ecosystems, biodiversity, populations, earth systems, land and water use, energy, atmospheric pollution, aquatic pollution, and global change—sound enormous. In actuality, not all trivia is tested on the test. It assesses students’ ability to make connections between ideas, read a graph truthfully, and compose a cohesive paragraph outlining the significance of a wetland or the potential operation of a carbon tax.
At 8 a.m. in May, that’s more difficult than it sounds. It’s difficult to ignore how much the test favors poise over intelligence. Pupils who struggle with math frequently have a deeper understanding of the subject than their test results indicate. As this happens year after year, there’s a sense that the APES exam isn’t really measuring environmental science alone, but rather how well a teen can think when the screen won’t wait, the timer is running, and the room is silent.
