Oh, the Humanities! (hehe)

[mcharding86]

Hey Everyone, I am a newbie here.. i have been studying for this Humanities exam for about 3 weeks now. I have the REA Book, flash cards, and and now starting the IC flash cards. If anyone has taken the humanities test, could you please give me some insight on how hard it is?

right now i feel like my brain is at full capacity, since i am taking a full load at my university and trying to study for this thing so i don't have to take a summer class before I graduate! (they put this class on me last minute... how thoughtful of them!).

Any comments on the material, format, or how much music (which is alien to me) is on it would be of great help! thanks everyone!!!

Mary-Claire

[vegas4x4]

I just took the Humanities test last friday and passed with a 57. I used IC, Wikipedia, Petersons' and an old Comex book to study. I spent about 2 weeks studying 2 hours a night and maybe 4 hours a day on the weekends.

I was very hesitant about taking the humanities test because I had no background in art, music, literature, etc. I didn't know any famous works of art, music, etc. I didn't know shakespear's comedies from tragedies, etc.

I studied a lot on the art sections and was able to nail all those questions no problem. Music there wasn't too many questions and I felt most of them were pretty easy. I just knew about 3 major composers for each time period and 2-3 major works for each composer. I had a lot of literature related questions in my test and a lot of those were modern literature. Another section on the test that kinda threw me was a lot of greek mythology questions. I had to identify who certain statues were, identify gods based on a description, etc. There was a bit of poetry and writing analysis, most of this was common sense.

Things I would definitely know:

Art - Michelangelo, Leonardo Davinci, Rodin (sculptures), Salvadori Dali, Picasso. Be able to identify medieval, renaissance, cubism, expressionist works, pop art, surrealism. Be able to identify when you're looking at reliefs, diptych, and frescos.

Music - Know your major composers and their famous works within the classical, romantic, and modern period at a minimum. Off the top of my head, mozart's magic flute, beethoven's erotica. Know music terminology: identify bass vs treble clef, meter signature, know what syncopation is. I had several questions relating to ragtime music too (scott joplin).

Literature/Poems - Know the plot, author, and main characters of: shakespear's famous works, dantes inferno, paradise lost, canterbury tales, the illiad, the oddesey, a dolls house. Be able to identify a rhyme scheme. Know what poetry meter is.

Greek Mythology - Identify major gods from statues and from descriptions.

That's just a quick brain dump from what I can remember. I didn't use IC that much, just in the art section. IC went into major depth and if I would have exhaustively studied it, I'm sure I would have scored much higher.

The comex book was a great help in the poetry and literature since it actually taught you poetry related terms and went over major literature works. That made it worth the price of the book alone.

The peterson book was a good overall review and I felt the practice exam was a good representation of the actual CLEP test I took.

Overall I went from knowing zero about humanities to being able to pass the exam in roughly a one month timeframe. It's a very do-able test.

[snazzlefrag]

Clever thread title Mary-Claire.
hilarious

I got a kick out of that!

Thanks,
Snazzlefrag