Note: This post is one in a series on how we prepared our homeschooled children to take various College Level Examination?Program tests. The introductory post for this series explains why we take these tests, what parts of the preparation worked for us, and what parts of the preparation did not work.

The CLEP test: PreCalculus

Primary study materials:

Secondary study materials:

Discussion:

Every one of the math programs we used to educate the kids during homeschool contributed to Kelly’s performance on this test.  We started with Singapore Math and did that through sixth grade.  That broke down for us in the seventh grade when we switched from Singapore Math to Teaching Textbooks.  I described what we thought about the change from Teaching Textbooks here. When we hit Precalculus, Teaching Textbooks broke down for us, so we did another investigation and moved on to Thinkwell math.  You can read about our thinking when we made that change here. As always, we got the REA CLEP book for Precalculus to use in conjunction with Thinkwell for the actual test preparation.  Thinkwell was much broader and more detailed than the REA book, so after finishing the Thinkwell course, the REA book did its usual great job of narrowing down the sections of Thinkwell to revisit just to prepare for the test.  Of course, the REA tests were excellent as test preparedness metrics, too.

Results:

Kelly was sixteen years old at the end of the tenth grade when she took this test and had a scaled score that, according to the REA book, would give her a B if the course were graded.

What we would do differently:

We really felt pretty good about how Kelly did on this test.  The thing that might have moved her into the A category would have been more practice.  She has a firm grasp of all the concepts, but it takes lots of practice to avoid the ciphering errors and remember all the minutiae of this broad and minutiae filled subject.