As the semester comes to a close, students in many classes are taking unit exams, but in AP Environmental Science classes, they’ll be doing something a little different, taking a midterm assessment on Tuesday and Wednesday which covers all units from the course that they’ve gone through so far.
“The midterm will cover all five units we have seen during the first semester,” teacher Gerald Nichols said. “Overall, it will be similar to how their unit summative assessments looked for this semester. All the questions are MCQs with around half being for our most recent unit we are finishing, and the other half are split between the four units we previously completed.”
The midterm is a new thing this year, and it was implemented with the purpose of giving students the chance to review course material on a large scale as well as to prepare them for college, where Midterm exams are common.
“For college readiness, we know most every student who takes APES does plan on attending college in the future, and midterms and finals are a very important part of that experience,” Nichols said. “[Also], since we already take a final due to preparation for the AP Exam, we—Mrs. Berendt and I—saw the idea of a mid-year assessment as good practice for students to review the course material and also see how everything does tie together in this course, as each unit somewhat builds into the [next].”
Going into the test, senior Nakshatra Aripineni is feeling a mix of nerves and confidence.
“This is definitely one of the first cumulative tests I’ve had in high school, so I’m a little nervous, but also somewhat confident,” Aripineni said. “It’s a lot of material, but since we’ve been building on it all semester, some of it feels familiar.”
To study for the test, senior Mahi Kosuri is using a couple different resources.
“I was able to go in and look at the past summatives, which really helped a lot,” Kosuri said. “But on top of that, I found a review on Youtube which covers all four topics that we’re going to be assessed on.”
There are certain topics that Aripineni already knows well, and others that she feels she needs to study more in depth.
“I feel pretty confident with units one through three, especially topics like biomes, energy flow, and adaptations,” she said. “[But] I think I need to review unit four more, especially the atmosphere and earth systems, since some of those concepts are more complex.”
