World Religion

[SuZQ2]

Honestly, I always highly recommend the quick prep sheets from free-clep-prep. He doesn't have them available for very many exams, but for the few that are they're amazingly helpful. Introduction to World Religions DSST Quick Prep Sheet - Free-Clep-Prep.com Totally worth $9. I've passed exams using his quick prep sheets as sole resources.

I honestly didn't really like the IC flashcards for this one - they just felt too scattered for me. Religions are easier to understand, at least for me, if I take a more systematic approach to learning about them.

The World Religions exam can be really intimidating - there's a *lot* of material there, potentially, but it's not as bad as it looks.

The fact sheet is actually really helpful for this exam. The breakdown they list is as follows (reordered from largest percentage to smallest).

18% Christianity
16% Islam
16% Judaism
10% Hinduism
10% Buddhism
8% Religious Movements
6% Indigenous Religions
6% Definition and Origins of Religion
6% Confucianism
4% Taoism

That gives you a rough idea of what your priorities are. I would study all of those categories, of course, but you probably want to narrow it down to about one page of key facts about Taoism, but know quite a bit more about the Abrahamic faiths. Honestly, this is a great exam to study for using wikipedia - just search for each faith, and read the main pages.

I remember that there were several questions that seemed very similar to things I'd seen on the General Anthropology exam.

One thing to pay particular attention to is the vocabulary. Karma and dharma, for Hinduism and Buddhism, for instance. Know the words for the five pillars of Islam in Arabic as well as their English translations. That sort of thing.

Thanks so much Leherself - I looked into the free-clep prep study guide, but didn't know if it was worthwhile - as per your recommendation, I'll definitely get a copy...

Will also utilize Wikipedia - as you said, IC seems a bit disjointed...it's especially intimidating when you're forcing yourself to study a subject in which you have very little prior knowledge and that subject contains numerous foreign language references...:ack:

Again, many thanks for the helpful advice!