Score Higher on AP Environmental 2024: MCQ Tips from Students

Multiple Choice Questions

This guide organizes advice from past students who got 4s and 5s on their exams. We hope it gives you some new ideas and tools for your study sessions. But remember, everyone's different—what works for one student might not work for you. If you've got a study method that's doing the trick, stick with it. Think of this as extra help, not a must-do overhaul.

📌 Overview

• Students are asked to explain environmental processes, use math, justify environmental solutions, and analyze research studies and data
• 60% of Exam Score
• 80 questions
• 90 min, or 1 min 7 sec per question

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💭General Advice

Tips on mindset, strategy, structure, time management, and any other high level things to know

• Answer the easy questions first.
• You should have a positive and confident mindset, don’t doubt yourself too much.
• Get a good night’s sleep and take it easy the day before the exam.
• Remember to eat breakfast!!!
• Try to take deep breaths to calm yourself.
• Make sure to understand what the question is asking for; if the question specifically asks for which answer choice is false, keep that in mind.
• With that in mind, make sure to catch questions that ask for the EXCEPTION to the rule.
• Look at which units make up the largest percentage and determine which units you need to study a little more to feel confident for the test.
• There are great videos on YouTube about mathematical techniques, processes, and interpreting data. Make sure to review these videos the days leading up to the exam. They can even make a great podcast!
• When practicing, it is a great idea to write down any questions you get wrong and mark what unit/chapter they originated from. Once you are done with your study session(s), you can look back on what questions you got wrong, identify the sections you are most in need of studying for, and be better prepared next time.
• Bozeman science videos on YouTube are really helpful to quickly review large topics, along with visual charts to help understand better! REDRAW any charts that are shown in the videos to remember them better :D
• SLEEP. Don't stay up till 3 am studying!!! I promise it will not help! Space out your study sessions beforehand and make sure you get adequate sleep!!
• Don't speed or rush to finish. Keep a constant pace, if you feel like you're spending too long on one question, finish the rest of the page before coming back to it.
• Go through and just make a mark in each bubble instead of bubbling it fully and then every 10-15 problems, bubble an entire section. Helps save time and concentration because you don’t have to switch between two tasks, but remember to bubble in everything at the end.
• Be sure that you can connect different concepts from other units. This will help you understand the important details as well.
• For AP tests, it is more important to understand overall patterns than details, so make sure you understand the different relationships between variables.
• For AP tests, it's best to not try and memorize every single thing—this will just result in burnout. Make sure to focus on the key points of the chapter, and avoid cram studying try to start studying a couple weeks before hand. Study the key materials at least 3 or more times so it will get into your long-term memory. Make sure to get plenty of sleep the night before and eat a healthy breakfast and drink plenty of water to improve brain function! Making your mind clearer for test day. Another tip that can help some with efficiency is working from the last question forward, this is from experience it has helped numerous times with finishing test on time if not more efficiently!
• When in doubt use process of elimination, cross out the ones you know are wrong until you're between two options, then go with your gut always, never second guess.

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🫧 Before you Bubble

What should a student do in the first few minutes, before they start answering?

• Start by skimming over the question and highlight/underline the key points. Oftentimes, there is a lot of unnecessary information in questions, so doing this will help avoiding over-thinking the answer. Then, read over the question with answers again. Now that you know the key points/ main focus of the question it will make finding the answer less stressful!
• USE context clues.
• UNDERLINE important key points.
• Understand what the question is asking you to do. Sometimes it will ask for which answer is NOT the right answer out of all of the above, so make sure to underline those instances.
• Questions often implement information that is not necessarily useful for the question(s) given. As to not distract or throw you off, try to hide, block, or scribble out such information.
• ANNOTATE the paragraphs by underlining keywords and circling things you know that you understand.
• Look for keywords that help indicate what type of answer you should be giving, such as identify (give information without elaboration) or justify (defend a claim and/or give evidence).

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🤔Choosing the Best Answer

• ELIMINATE answer choices that don’t correlate with the question.
• Look out for any answer choices that are very similar or say the same thing but with different wordings. These answer choices are trying to trick the reader.
• Emphasis on the above bullet point, they're right.
• Start by narrowing down the answer choice but looking for key points that correlate to the question, and leave a marking beside the potential answers. Then narrow it down until you find the best fitting answer choice.
• Never second guess yourself on an answer choice; this comes from experience. :(
• Stick with your gut!

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📖 How To Read Data

• Make sure to pay attention to what the x-axis and y-axis of the data represent so you don’t end up misinterpreting the data. Pay attention to the titles of graphs as well.
• Think about and understand what the different categories are—especially if it’s a line graph—you definitely don’t want to mix up your variables and categories!
• The excerpt often given data is your best friend on MCQ questions—you should look at the excerpt before looking at the graph so you can understand the context.
• Notice and note obvious trends within the data. Questions commonly ask about how one variable impacts the other variable.
• Units on the X and Y axis are crucial to understand. If you don't understand it yet, practice questions with graphs.
• Annotate off to the side briefly what you can see clearly when u read the graph ( t r e n d s ).
• When analyzing the data, make sure to underline the key data or cross out the unnecessary data. They test creators use this to trick the tester and can cause overthinking. With graphs try to focus on what the question is asking and Annotate of the the side the information needed.
• Circle the information that the question asks for and focus only on that for each question.