REA spanish audio and CLEP scoring

[astrojeff]

I had seen comments on bad sound quality, but I wasn't expecting it to be so quiet. I was thinking, "you've got to be joking" when I maxed out the voume button on my test. Even with my earphones, I had to press them on my ears to overcome the ambient room noise. But I understood almost everything with a little effort, so it wasn't a disaster.

I think I balanced to two sections fairly well. It still make me curious if you can just bomb the listening part and make it up in the reading comprehension part, but luckily I didn't need to worry about that. I was getting about 50% right on the REA listening portion (half of which were from wild guesses) versus 95% right on the Peterson's test (Most of which were confident choices). I'd guess I got about 90% right on the actual test. On a few questions I know I understood the passage well, but some of the questions were specific enough that I forgot the detail they were asking.

Also, the internet connection crashed on me in the middle of one of the listening questions (thank god the server saves your intermediate score and time), and by the time they logged me back in 15 minutes later, I could not remember the passage well enough to answer the question--of course I couldn't go back! I have some sort of bad luck because my first attempt at taking the test a month or so back was interrupted and refunded because the server was malfunctioning. The testing centers around here and apparently the CLEP servers are working on some ancient equipment!

The real CLEP test had more lists of things to remember than I had seen on any of the study portions. You know, stuff like: "jose wakes up every morning and listens to music before showering, then he gets dressed, reads the paper, eats breakfast, and excersises before going to work" Then, the question would have a list of items that you have to put into order--listening to music, getting dressed, going to work, excersising--for example. You could almost tell during the passage that it was going to be a list question, so luckily I did take notes on the order of things and it was useful to remember. But a few times, I was thinking afterwards, hmmm... did he read the paper first, or listen to music first... it's easy to forget even if you understood it correctly in the first place.

So there were definitely a couple listening questions that I know I guessed, and a few others I was not 100% sure, but I felt confident about the majority of them. Same with the reading section. I was confident about most of it, but there were a few words or grammar points that I was wavering over. So I'm pretty sure each section weighed approximately the same in my exam.