Pass Rates

[barcotta]

PLEASE, take these with a grain of salt. At most--you can take the extremely high scores and extremely low scores and MAYBE use that to evaluate difficulty. Lucky for us, larrycrys actually pasted in some of last year's pass rates into a post so here they are to compare:

CLEP PASS RATE FY07
(Military Examinees Only)

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English Composition (without Essay) 30%
Social Science and History 35%
Natural Sciences 34%
Humanities 28%
College Mathematics 32%
Analyzing & Interpreting Literature 64%
College Algebra 17%
Freshman College Composition 54%
History of the U.S. I 23%
History of the U.S. II 25%
Information Systems & Computer Applications 44%
Introductory Psychology 34%
Introductory Sociology 37%
Principles of Management 57%

DSST
A History of the Vietnam War 38%
An Introduction to the Modern Middle East 41%
Art of the Western World 35%
Astronomy 43%
Business Law II 39%
Business Mathematics 64%
Western Europe Since 1945 35%
Criminal Justice 46%
Drug and Alcohol Abuse 41%
Environment and Humanity: The Race to Save the Planet 56%
Ethics in America 58%
Foundations of Education 49%
Fundamentals of College Algebra 25%
Fundamentals of Counseling 25%
General Anthropology 32%
Here’s to Your Health 69%
Human Cultural Geography 44%
Human Resource Management 61%
Introduction to Business 73%
Introduction to Computing 84%
Introduction to Law Enforcement 59%
Introduction to World Religions 57%
Lifespan Developmental Psychology 38%
Management Information Systems 74%
Money and Banking 13%
Organizational Behavior 42%
Personal Finance 62%
Physical Geology 16%
Principles of Finance 16%
Principles of Financial Accounting 21%
Principles of Physical Science I 46%
Principles of Public Speaking 83%
Principles of Statistics 29%
Principles of Supervision 62%
Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union 37%
Technical Writing 74%
The Civil War and Reconstruction 35%

Please note my favorite--25% pass rate on Fundamentals of Counseling. For those who are not familiar with that test--it is not a difficult exam. The fact that 3/4 of the military personnel who took that test did not pass says a whole lot--but nothing about the difficulty of the test.

Seriously--those guys don't have to pay so they have nothing to lose. There HAS to be a serious overload of people taking many of these tests cold to pound some of these pass rates into the ground.

Now, there are tougher tests, like Management Information Systems ("MIS"), that have high pass rates. I believe that people who take these tests cold may be avoiding exams on very specific topics, such as MIS, for which they know they have no knowledge whatsoever. So, if my theory is correct, everyone and their brother is trying exams like Fundamentals of Counseling, which is artificially reducing the pass rate--and mostly folks who really know the material are taking the tougher, specific exams like MIS--which makes some of those exams appear less difficult proportionately.

So, especially for the newbies--DO NOT rely on these pass rates. Use the Specific Exam Feedback section to inform yourself. This section includes (mostly) people who really cared, studied and tried and THEIR cumulative analysis of the difficulty level will be your best guide.