As a returning student 18 years out of the game, I wanted to get off to a big start in a subject area where I already felt pretty comfortable. So last fall, I decided to take the CLEP Humanities General exam because it would get me 6 hours of credit for knowledge I already possessed. After getting 61/70 correct on the College Board’s “official” practice exam, I scheduled a testing date.
Then I got cold feet, decided a little preparation couldn’t hurt, and ordered REA’s CLEP Humanities with CD-ROM. The good reviews here were encouraging, and the “Testware” software put REA above the rest for me.
The good: The book contains concise yet comprehensive reviews of all the major subject areas covered on the test. (I thought I was pretty savvy, but I still learned a lot.) Each chapter ends with a drill on the subject matter — including material that wasn’t covered. If you learn all the material presented, you’re sure to pass the test. There are three complete practice tests, all of which turned out to be much harder than the actual exam. I found the heightened difficulty level to be a plus: Better to not get too cocky and to be a little better prepared than necessary than to not be prepared enough. (If you’re that close to the pass/fail line, maybe you need to just take the courses.)
The back of the book contains nice glossaries of (1) important literary figures by period and (2) literary terms. There’s also a conventional subject index.
The not so good: Testware is a good idea executed badly. I used it to take the first practice test and it scored me with 55 correct answers out of 140. This was a little discouraging, as I thought I’d done better. As I reviewed the correct answers and explanations, I soon found 2 questions I was sure I had given the correct answers to that Testware said I answered incorrectly. Then I knew there was a glitch when a question I had answered incorrectly was scored as correct.
This was all within the first 27 questions, so I stopped right there and re-did the first test, duplicating my answers from before. This time, I created an Excel spreadsheet, entering first my answers and then the correct answers from the key. My actual number of correct answers on test 1 was 78, not 55 — more in line with how I felt I had done. I didn’t use Testware to take the second practice test, but stuck to my spreadsheet method for it and test 3 (which is only offered in the book, anyway).
I was disappointed that the book didn’t have much in the way of timelines, and much key information was “buried” in the text such that I felt the continuous urge to highlight in the book, which I didn’t want to do because I intended to sell it when I was finished. Glossaries on artists, artistic movements, musical terms, and architects would have been nice but were absent.
Bottom line: REA’s CLEP Humanities book makes an excellent component to your test preparation. The software might be helpful in acclimating yourself to computerized testing if, like me, you’ve never done it before. Just don’t rely on the software to score you correctly. For added security, I recommend using a second preparatory book. Toward the end of my studying, I picked up a 2005 copy of Kaplan’s CLEP general exam book, which filled in some gaps for me. It also contains practice tests, and, unlike REA’s book, also includes book recommendations for independent study. (But it’s not as thorough for review purposes.)
I scored 78/80, which would have translated to an A if only Excelsior gave letter grades for CLEP exams. I would likely have passed without studying at all, but it was worth the extra time and money to go in feeling uber-prepared.
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