College Mathematics – My Approach

[soltran]

For those that may have seen my previous posts, I recently took the CLEP College Mathematics test as my first test having not studied the subject for about 25 years. I gave myself approximately 2 weeks to prepare for this test while simultaneously preparing for the Principles of Marketing, working 40 hours a week, commuting 10 hours a week and trying to maintain a normal family life. I passed both tests, the Math with a 64 and the Marketing with a 71. I found this forum to be an invaluable aid and in an effort to pay back the forum I wanted to share my approach on the off chance that it helps even one other person preparing for the same test. I gained a lot of insight and confidence from the forum before taking the test and I hope this post helps others in some small way.

Resources Used:

InstantCert
CLEP Official Study Guide 18th Edition
Cracking the CLEP 4th edition
REA - CLEP General Exams with CD

With the limited amount of time I had given myself it was important that I ensured that I concentrated on the correct areas of study. This for me was a two step approach, I started by doing a couple of practice tests to determine my stronger and weaker areas and then analyzing the exam content as presented in the CLEP guide. I found that I was stronger in the areas of Sets, Logic, Real Number Systems and Probability and Statistics which corresponded to 65% of the exam content. So this is the area I concentrated on.

My reasoning was quite simple. I had a pretty good handle on these areas and the test was a pass/fail so it didn’t really matter by how much I passed, just as long as I did. The effort required to strengthen my strengths was going to be a lot less than that required to strengthen my weaknesses especially as I’d be almost be starting from scratch in those areas.

The goal was to ensure that I could confidently answer
5/6 questions in Sets
5/6 questions in Logic
10/12 questions in Real Number Systems
13/15 questions in Probability and Statistics

That in itself would give me a pass but without much of a buffer. I did expect that the other two areas; Functions and their Graphs and Additional Topics would contain at least one “gimme” each and I was hoping that of the remaining questions I could successfully guess at least 3.

Now this may seem like a dangerous approach especially considering the number of questions in each area is an approximation and can change from test to test but the goals set for my strength areas were the minimums I was expecting while the goals I set for my weaker areas were the maximums I was expecting. In reality I was expecting 6/6 for sets but allowing for 5/6 to account for “exam stupidity” on my part (misreading questions etc). And I can say the same for my other strength areas so I was feeling quite confident in passing the test.

What I found was that to get to the point where I was confident in my strengths didn’t take as long as I thought it would which did allow me to spend at least some time on my weaknesses which didn’t hurt my confidence or the final result.

When it came to the test itself I answered my strength questions as I came to them, answered my weak questions if I knew the answer almost immediately and guessed the questions I didn’t know but also marked them so that with time permitting I could go back at the end of the test and put some more thought into them.

It took about 45 minutes to complete the test and I felt pretty confident when I was finished. Without knowing exactly how the rated scores work I can only assume that I answered somewhere between 40 and 50 questions correctly to receive a score of 64.

This approach may not work for everyone but it did allow me to enter the exam without anxiety as I never even contemplated failing. My final score wasn’t great but I did achieve what I had set out to do.

I hope this is of some help.

Regards