Ready for Spanish CLEP?

[Maniac Craniac]

I took the 2010 Official CLEP Study Guide practice test for Spanish and got 73.5% of the questions correct. Could I reasonably expect to take the real thing & score a 63, high enough for 12 credits?

Is the Spanish CLEP scaled tough because so many native speakers are taking it?

Any advice/experience appreciated.

I'd say that you are very likely to pass. Try taking the Peterson's free practice tests, too. If you can keep doing over 70%, then you are golden.

Some advice; if you have trouble on the listening portion, DON'T PANIC!! You can, in fact, pass this test even if you get every single question on the listening portion wrong (which is statistically unlikely to happen anyway). Be aware that the sound quality on the CLEP exam is just flat out awful, and even if you would normally understand spoken Spanish, you probably won't on the test.

Also, remember to ask for pencil and paper so that you can take notes along the way. This is very important, even for the reading portion of the exam. If there is a key word or grammatical structure that you aren't sure about, you can write it down and see if it pops up later on the list. I did this on the French exam and it helped me to answer about 3 questions.

One last thing, on both the French and Spanish exams, I found that I did not have time to complete every question. So, when you have about 10 minutes left, I would advise you to take note of what question you are on, then go and answer every remaining question with a random answer (I chose C). Then, go back to the last question you answered intentionally, and take your remaining time to get as many questions as you can correct.

For both exams, there were about 10 questions that I simply had to leave a random answer for. However, it is obviously better than leaving them blank