How to Pass Environmental Science in College: A Unit-by-Unit Study Plan

Here's how to pass environmental science: treat it as a course about systems, not a list of vocabulary. Learn each cycle and process well enough to draw it from a blank page, practice the handful of calculations the course keeps reusing, read a graph or data table every week, and answer every human-impact question as a chain of cause, effect and solution. Then test yourself on all of it, a little at a time, instead of rereading your notes the night before.

This guide shows what a college intro environmental science course covers (checked against three college catalogs and College Board's course framework), why students who expected an easy science credit get surprised, a unit-by-unit plan with a free place to practice each topic, the math you need, and how to handle the data and solution questions that exams lean on.

What environmental science class in college covers

Intro environmental science is usually a one-semester course built for non-majors and beginning science students alike. Tacoma Community College describes its ENVS&101 as "an interdisciplinary science course" covering overpopulation, energy, biodiversity, climate change and pollution, with labs and field trips (Tacoma CC). Everett Community College's version centers on how human population growth changes ecosystems, energy flow, biological diversity and sustainable use of living resources (Everett CC). At the Community College of Baltimore County, the 3-credit lecture covers ecology, water resources, populations, energy, climate and nutrient cycling, and its objectives include describing data "numerically and graphically" and discussing environmental justice (CCBC).

College Board calls AP Environmental Science the equivalent of "a one-semester, introductory college course in environmental science" (College Board). AP courses cover intro college-level material, which makes Lykke's free AP Environmental Science course a ready-made practice bank for a college class. Its nine units line up with the topics in those three catalogs:

Your professor may reorder these, skip some or add policy and environmental justice, as CCBC does. The syllabus decides what's on your exams; use the table to see where each lecture fits.

Is environmental science hard?

It's rarely hard in the way organic chemistry is. Three things make it harder than it looks:

• Breadth. One semester spans biology, chemistry, geology, atmospheric science, economics and policy. Each lecture is approachable; the pile of them by the final is not.
• Math in small doses. CCBC lists a math course as a prerequisite, and College Board recommends at least a year of algebra before the AP version. You won't do calculus, but you will convert units, compute percent change and work out energy per person, often without much warning.
• Data, not definitions. Exams lean on graphs, tables and maps. The AP exam builds whole question sets around data tables, graphs, models and maps, and its three free-response questions ask you to design an investigation, interpret data and analyze a problem with calculations, each time proposing a solution (AP Central). College courses ask for the same skills: CCBC's outline lists describing data and evaluating solutions to environmental problems among its objectives.

Exams carry at least half the grade, too. CCBC's outline requires at least three exams and two quizzes, puts 50% to 60% of the grade on exams and makes the final cumulative. If you came in expecting a memorization course, change what you practice: cycles, calculations and data.

How to study environmental science: five habits

1. Draw every cycle from memory. Close the book and sketch the carbon cycle with each reservoir and flux labeled, then check it. Repeat until the sketch comes out complete. The same goes for the nitrogen, phosphorus and water cycles and for energy moving up a food web.
2. Write each human impact as a four-part chain. Cause, what it changes, the effect, and one solution with its drawback. "Fertilizer runoff → excess nitrogen and phosphorus in a lake → algal bloom, then low dissolved oxygen as the algae decompose → buffer strips along fields, which take land out of production." All three AP free-response questions ask for a solution, and a chain like this is what a complete answer looks like.
3. Read one graph a day. Take any figure from your textbook or lecture slides and say out loud what the axes are, what the trend is, and what would explain it. Five minutes is enough.
4. Quiz, don't reread. A major review of ten study techniques rated practice testing and spreading study over time as the two most useful, and rated rereading and highlighting low (Dunlosky et al., 2013). In a classic experiment, students who took a recall test on a passage remembered substantially more two days and a week later than students who restudied it (Roediger & Karpicke, 2006).
5. Mix old units into new weeks. Finals are often cumulative, and topics connect: biomagnification only makes sense if you remember trophic levels from week two. Spend part of every session on an earlier unit.

How to pass environmental science: a unit-by-unit practice plan

Each row names what you should be able to do before the exam, with a free place to practice it in Lykke's AP Environmental Science course.

Taking intro biology at the same time? The ecology chapters overlap, and the biology study guide covers how to study them from that side.

The math you need for environmental science

Five kinds of calculation come up again and again. Show every unit in every step: a calculation with labeled units is easy to check, for you and for whoever grades it.

• Unit conversions. A household uses 900 kilowatt-hours a month. Over a year that's 900 × 12 = 10,800 kWh. If the grid emits 0.4 kg of CO₂ per kWh, the year's electricity accounts for 10,800 × 0.4 = 4,320 kg, or about 4.3 metric tons. Write the units next to each number and cancel them like fractions.
• Percent change. A lake's phosphorus rises from 20 to 35 micrograms per liter: (35 − 20) ÷ 20 × 100 = 75% higher. Divide by the starting value, not the ending one.
• Per capita. A city of 400,000 uses 60 million liters of water a day: 60,000,000 ÷ 400,000 = 150 liters per person per day.
• Doubling time. The rule of 70 estimates how long a steadily growing population takes to double: 70 ÷ growth rate in percent. At 2% a year, about 35 years.
• Energy up a food web. With roughly 10% passing to each level, 10,000 kcal of plants supports about 1,000 kcal of herbivores, 100 of first-level carnivores and 10 at the top.

Calculators are permitted on the AP exam. Your professor may allow one too, so check the syllabus and practice with the device you'll use.

How to answer data and free-response questions

Data questions start from a scenario: a table of fish counts below a dam, a graph of CO₂ over sixty years, a map of a watershed. Work through it in order:

1. Describe before you explain. State the trend with numbers from the figure ("dissolved oxygen falls from 9 to 3 mg/L over 2 km") before you name a cause. A cause with no numbers attached doesn't show you read the figure.
2. Explain with a mechanism. Name the process that connects the cause to the data, using the course's terms.
3. Propose a solution and its trade-off. A fix with no drawback reads as unexamined. "A wetland buffer filters runoff, but it costs farmland."
4. For investigation questions, name the variables. Say what you'd change, what you'd measure, what you'd keep constant and what your control group is.

For a sense of the AP exam's shape, the free APES Exam Blueprint demo lays out the sections. The course's AP Practice 1 section walks through designing an investigation, variables and controls included, and AP Practice 4 works a nitrate-runoff data problem from the calculation to the solution.

How to study for an environmental science exam

A week out, work backward from the date:

• Days 7–5: List every topic from the exam's lectures. For each one, write the cycle, chain or calculation you'd need. Quiz yourself on them and mark the misses.
• Days 4–3: Redo the missed items from scratch, then do mixed practice that pulls from every unit on the exam. Work two or three data questions under a timer.
• Day 2: Take a full practice set, ideally an old exam if your professor posts them. Fix what broke.
• Day 1: Quiz yourself on the misses only, sketch each cycle one last time, and sleep.

Flashcards that return at growing intervals keep the vocabulary alive without a cram; the spaced repetition guide explains how to set that up. If the exam is tomorrow, the one-day exam plan is the triage version.

If you're behind in environmental science

Start with the highest-weighted material your syllabus lists for the next exam, not with week one. Learn each topic's core process, do five practice questions on it, and move on. Because exams sample every unit, get a working grasp of each topic before you perfect any one of them. Go to office hours with two specific questions, such as a graph you couldn't read. If a bad first exam has you worried about the final grade, the guide to what happens if you fail a midterm shows how to do the grade math and what to change.