u/Voided_Identity

My degree program is going to require two arts and humanities general education courses, and all four Clep options (US History I and II, and Western Civ I and II) are accepted in place of courses my school includes as options to fulfill this requirement.

I'm just curious which track is easier. My first assumption is that the US History track would be easier. But then I wonder if it goes so far in depth that they make for harder tests, due to covering more fine detail. I'll be using Modern States to study and refresh my memory from high school.

I'm confident in my ability to pass both tests on either track. But the biggest advantage of Clep for me is time management. I have to keep a roof over my head and also afford to pay for tuition, while having enough time left over to attend class. So if one track is notably easier than the other and will require less preparation time, that's better for me.

I see lots of posts about test results and laundry lists of apparent study/learning material, but few people seem to talk much about the tests themselves outside of generics. But that's really of limited use to help prepare, other than to urge people to set out on a broad fishing expedition.

It seems to me that one of the best reasons to take a clep test is to bypass needlessly difficult courses (like bio weed-out classes), and the best preparation should try to avoid repeating the same offenses of chasing data dumps and aimless searches through disorganized information. So maybe we can talk more about how to prepare someone for the test directly.

What does it actually take to pass the biology test? How does the test compare to the Modern States final exam? What exactly makes it a difficult test? Does the test use a lot of confusing wording? Do the questions require applying extremely in depth knowledge to synthesize the answer?

How many questions do you have to get right? Obviously that can't be known for certain, but scaled scoring could mean it takes 100/115 to get a 50, or it might only be 40/115. So how did people feel the score they received compared to their sense of how many questions they were confident about?