REA spanish audio and CLEP scoring

[astrojeff]

Glad I found this forum. I am self-taught in Spanish and now need a 63 or higher on the CLEP in order to avoid taking college credits as a prerequisite for a job application. I've got one chance to take the CLEP in the next month and save myself a few thousand dollars on tuition.

I've been working on my REA study guide for a couple weeks and I'm wondering how its scoring compares with the actual test. My concern is that I was pretty frustrated with the listening portion--got about 50% of those questions right (25% would be due to random guessing), but I got about 95% on the grammar section. I scored in the low 100s, which corrected to 80 on the first practice test, but I was skeptical of the REA scoring method, which combined the total score of listening and grammar before looking up your corrected score in the table. Anything above a 100 out of 130 gets you a normalized 80. So my first question is can I really completely bomb the listening part and completely make up for it in the written/grammar portion? According to that book I can.

I'm not that bad at understanding spoke spanish, but I either forget the question by the time I've heard all answers, or I tend to get hung up on a word when listening to something out of context for the first time. I've seen some advice here on taking notes during the audio portion, which I will try on the next audio test, but I think I'll have the same problem of failing to hear the remaining dialog as I'm writing--it just went so fast for me that I'm not sure I can write notes fast enough. No, I can't write shorthand, unfortunately. There's no pause between the listening portion and the answering portion, and there's hardly even enough time to read all the answers before the next audio question starts up. Is there any pause allowed between questions on the real test?

I see that I can take the Peterson tests online--is that correct? Is it worth it compared to the REA test book & CD? I really just need to practice more of the audio tests, not so much the written test. Otherwise, I'm listing to spanish podcasts & lessons all the time (Cody's cuentos, SSL4U, learning like crazy II), watching telenovelas online, and doing everything I can to hone my audio skills, but I think it's a matter of getting used to the uncomfortable CLEP format of the audio test. And if I really can offset the audio with my grammar portion, perhaps I shouldn't worry so much.