One of our readers, Ruthie, and I have had some discussion in the comment section of this blog about what we do to prepare for the College Level Examination Program (CLEP) tests. Most homeschoolers do not have access to the Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IP) programs available at many high schools. Kids in those programs have a leg up on other students when they go to college. We wanted something like that for our own children. The CLEP tests provide us with a mechanism to meet the testing part of that goal. College Board, the same company that makes the tests for the AP program and the SAT, make the CLEP tests. All the military branches provide the CLEP tests to their personnel for free. They are well established tests recognized by a broad spectrum of the higher education community. any colleges give credits to students who score 50 or above on the CLEP subject tests. Based on discussions with Ruthie and others, I have decided to write about how our kids prepare for the tests.
There are a number of reasons why we chose to include the CLEP tests in our homeschool activities. I will go into those reasons in more detail when I write the sections on the different subject tests because they vary. That being said, there are three reasons that hold true for us for all of the tests:
- The tests do a pretty good job of demonstrating mastery of materials often presented in freshman level college classes. Knowledge that the student has a grasp of the material is valuable to both the student and the teacher.
- The student receives credit for the material which advances them toward a degree more rapidly and less expensively than if they took the class in a conventional college setting.
- The textbooks and other study materials and the time to learn the material can be varied based on the needs of the student. In a conventional setting it is not possible to postpone the test for a month or switch textbooks midstream. We have done both.
Am I qualified to write about this? Maybe. Our daughter Kelly passed her first CLEP test, Freshman College Composition, when she was thirteen. That was almost exactly one year ago. Since then she has gone on to pass the Spanish, US History I, and Psychology tests. She plans to take the US History II, Sociology, and Biology tests before the end of our school year this June. Our thirteen year old son Christian passed the Freshman College Composition CLEP test last week. He plans to take Western Civilization I and either Psychology or Spanish this school year. Even though Kelly and Christian have passed all the tests they have taken so far, they did better on some than others. There were a couple very high scores, a couple mid-range scores, and a couple of squeakers.
While every parent rightly believes their children have exceptional qualities, this is not Lake Wobegon. All children are not above average. We have no illusions that our children have the raw intelligence of Newton or Einstein, but they have performed well on nationally normed standardized tests, read and write well, and enjoy studying. I think many homeschool students can do very well, even at an early age on these tests. I also have no illusion that the methods we used to prepare are the best way to prepare for the CLEP tests. The reality is that we did not do such a good job of preparation on a couple of tests so far. Maybe we learned something though. We will certainly try to prepare Christian differently for those tests where our preparation was not so great when Kelly took the test. This is made all the more challenging by the fact that Kelly and Christian have very different learning styles. What was not so good for Kelly might be great for Christian and vice versa. I will try to report on what we did, how we did it, and our results in a way that could help other homeschoolers who want to use the CLEP tests as part of their homeschool program.
CLEP Exam Links
The following is a preliminary list of the topics I will try to cover in this series of posts. I am sure it will change some as we go forward, but I will try to keep this page updated as an index to all the Homeschool CLEP preparation. My plan is to write three or four more posts on Wednesdays until I have covered everything we have done so far. I will write subsequent posts as we get to them. I will update this page with links and any modifications that make sense as I think of new things that might be helpful. I will make a standalone page with this index and a link on our ?Pages? list as soon as I have enough posts for that to make sense.
- Introduction
- Freshman English Composition
- Spanish
- US History I
- US History II
- Psychology and Sociology
- Biology
- Precalculus
- Western Civilization I
- Western Civilization II
- Microeconomics and Macroeconomics
- American Literature
- American Government
- French
I ran across your blog when I did a Google search for “using CLEP study guides for homeschool”. I’m selecting curriculum for my daughter going into 11th grade (our second year of homeschool) and was thinking about CLEP study and exams as a way of killing two birds with one stone (i.e. H.S. and college credit). It looks like you use additional, more traditional curriculum as well as the REA study guides. It that because it would be too dry and boring using only the study guides? Did you compare the various CLEP study guides before selecting REA? Do you think it’s feasible to use only the study guides and maybe supplement with readings – non-fiction and historical fiction, maybe? (I’m thinking about U.S. History here.) Do the study guides provide enough information to be considered a comprehensive overview of a subject?
Thanks for any comments and insight you can give,
Trish
Hello Trish. Thanks for the great comments. You asked exactly the same questions I asked when I started giving the kids CLEP tests. To make a long story short, we have chosen REA because they work for us. We made a brief deviation from that with U.S. History I, but got half way through the other program and switched back. For us, it really appears that if the kids do a close reading of the REA books, take lots of notes, and then study the notes, they are fairly well prepared.
We do read novels that go with the material and the best supplementary texts we can find to go with them. Our daughter took both US History tests and passed them. Based on the knowledge we derived from that experience, we are changing the program up a little. Our son (age 14 by the time he takes the tests) will take the US History I CLEP right after the first of the year, then the US History II at the end of the year. To prepare for the tests, we will use the REA History study books, novels from the U.S. History year from Sonlight and a text book we really like on US History titled A Patriot’s History of the United States (which we are reading aloud together as a family). We would have liked to have used what Sonlight provided, but it is the single area where we really believe they have fallen down by selecting what we believe was an agenda driven and abysmally written series by Joy Hakim titled A History of the USA. We hope Sonlight changes someday to something we can recommend. Our daughter was well prepared for the tests and we think our son, with the improved materials, will be even more prepared.
Does that help? If there is anything else with which I might help, please do not hesitate to ask and I will give it my best shot.
Thanks so much for taking the time to respond, even to the extent of adding links! Awesome. I may do the same thing as you and use the novels that Sonlight uses (although we will get them at the library). I was going to have my daughter read American novels this year for literature anyway, so we’ll tie it all in. Thanks again!
Your welcome Trish. We would love to hear how it goes with what you decide to do.
Hi – Our co-op group are just finishing our first class for high school credit/CLEP credit and we chose the Computer test to be our first. We have since discovered it’s not necessarily the easiest and though we thought that the kids all knowing so much about computers already would find it relatively easy, that hasn’t be the case at all. Of the 7 kids, 1 will be probably be able to plass the
CLEP test now and 1-2 need a little more study before they can pass. The biggest problem was motivation. Several don’t have any desire to go to college at all ever (these are mostly 9th and 10th graders) and see no reason to put much effort into this.
We’re looking at psychology for this fall and are looking for different ways to prepare. I found your site through a google search and I thank you very much for your insight and suggestions. I think this could be a much more interesting class to the kids and easier for parents to teach as it is not nearly so technical.
Thank you again.
Thanks for the great note Nancy. I think you are probably right with the Psychology class about the ability of the parent to teach. Now that our kids have both gone on to college, we have found that the CLEP preparation and testing was very well suited to helping the kids get ready to take tests, but less well suited for actually engaging with the material. That being said, I think the homeschool courses we delivered in parallel with CLEP preparation were much more well covered than the ones we covered with textbooks and course material alone. Our daughter CLEP’ed out of Psychology, but our son is just finishing up the equivalent class in college. He was fortunate in that he got a very good professor (a neuroscientist) and I think he got more out of his Psychology studies than our daughter. I think that is probably always true when a good professor is available. Our son studied for the Western Civilization I CLEP test, but never took the class. He is so math and science oriented that he struggled a little bit in that class when he took it in the fall. Even though we covered that material in homeschool fairly extensively, I think the CLEP preparation is what saved him. He ended up with a good grade in the class, mostly because of the rote memorization work he did studying for CLEP. I really do not believe that effort was wasted in that he was able to get more from the lectures due to his knowledge of the raw facts.
Thanks again for commenting. It sounds like you have a pretty amazing co-op group. It is interesting that there are good number of kids who do not want to go on to college. Even though our son is going on to a Bachelor’s Degree, his final speech topic for his Public Speaking class this semester was “Why you should consider NOT going to college.” Peter Theil, Charles Murray, Richard Vedder, and other are strongly advocating for the idea that society would be more well served with fewer people going to college.