AP Environmental Science
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Advanced Placement Environmental Science (or AP Environmental Science, a.k.a. APES) is a course offered by the College Board as part of the Advanced Placement Program to high school students interested in the environmental and natural sciences. This course is designed to provide students with scientific principles, concepts, and methodologies necessary to comprehend the relationships abundant within the natural world, to identify and analyze environmental problems, to evaluate relative risks associated with these identified problems, and to examine alternative solutions for resolving and/or preventing similar problems facing the global environment.
Contents |
[edit] Themes of the Course
- Science is a process.
- Science is a method of learning more about the world.
- Science constantly changes the way we understand the world.
- Energy conversions underlie all ecological processes.
- Energy cannot be created; it must come from somewhere.
- As energy flows through systems, at each step more of it becomes unusable.
- The Earth itself is one interconnected system.
- Natural systems change over time and space.
- Biogeochemical systems vary in ability to recover from disturbances.
- Humans alter natural systems.
- Humans have had an impact on the environment for millions of years.
- Technology and population growth have enabled humans to increase both the rate and scale of their impact on the environment.
- Environmental problems have a cultural and social context.
- Understanding the role of cultural, social and economic factors is vital to the development of solutions.
- Human survival depends on developing practices that will achieve sustainable systems.
- A suitable combination of conservation and development is required.
- Management of common resources is essential.
[edit] The Exam
- Section I: Multiple Choice (100 questions, 90 minutes)
- Section II: Free-Response (one data-set question, one document-based question, and two synthesis and evaluation questions, 90 minutes)
[edit] Popular Textbooks
The most popular textbook for the course is G. Tyler Miller's Living in the Envrionment The 15th edition of this book was recently published in September 2006. Miller is an AP scorer and question writer, so he knows what will be on the examination and his textbooks teach towards the test.
[edit] 2005 Statistics
In 2005, 38,104 students took the environmental science exam at 1,920 schools worldwide. The mean score was a 2.631.
| Score | Percent |
|---|---|
| 5 | 9.3% |
| 4 | 23.4% |
| 3 | 18.9% |
| 2 | 17.9% |
| 1 | 30.5% |
