Another CLEP scoring question...

[tpk]

I took three exams today...Principles of Management, Prin. of Macroecon, and Prin. of Microecon...

Management - 72 out of 100 q's answered correctly...unofficial ACE = 50
Macro - 70 out of 80 q's answered correctly....unofficial ACE = 50
Micro - 67 out of 80 q's correct....unofficial ACE = 50

What gives? It doesn't make a difference, credits are going to Excelsior, but I'm trying to wrap my head around this.

Thanks for any help/guidance!

[dfrecore]

The scores you received from CLEP were your scaled scores, not necessarily the number of correct answers.

The "Unofficial ACE" is just saying that you got more than the minimum score of 50, so you will get credit for it through ACE if you send it there.

[cookderosa]

I'm not on my home computer, I'm on vacation and away from all my files to give you real numbers- but the raw score isn't a percentage in the way you might be used to seeing. 85/100 correct = 85% but not on these tests. Each test has its own individual score formula. So, in theory, 85% correct on one score might be a scaled score of 60 on one exam, but on a different exam it might mean a 70!

I'm not totally sure I understand where your numbers in your question came from (practice scores?) but you won't have access to your actual raw score, only your scaled score. You also will never know the number of questions you got right or the number of questions on your test. Within each exam, some questions are not graded, so completing 80 doesn't mean you're graded on 80, perhaps only 77 of them are graded. In any event, you'll receive a score report with your scaled score and if it is higher than the required score (50) then you've passed. Hope that helps!

[jadae@wgu.edu]

My guess-timate for CLEP is that each exam has 3 question values. Low, medium, high difficulty. So for an exam of 75 questions, and with 5 of those question being experiment questions for CLEP exam makers, there could be 70 questions total. The minimum score one can receive is a 20, and the maximum is an 80. The questions could theoretically be 20 each questions, 30 medium questions, and 20 hard questions, for .7, 1, and 1.8 points, respectively.


So one could answer all of the easy questions for a score of 20+(20x.7=14), or 34, which is not passing, and most (2/3rd of) of the medium questions for 20 points. That would be 20+ 34, which is 54 points, which is passing, because one has proven they know more than average. And average is "C".

This is my best guess-timate for how these contraptions are scored. It may have more detail to it (such as more than 3 values for all questions), but that seems to be the general pattern to it. So if one can answer all easy Qs, and more than an average amount of moderate Qs, they seem likely to pass. If they can get difficult Q's, that adds buffer. However, most difficult Qs tend to be highly time intensive, and these exams are heavily time-oriented, only leaving 1 minute 12 seconds per question. Even experts would have trouble answering every single difficult question value, EXCEPT...

If they memorized the patterns for them. In Chemistry and Math, this may be the relationship of values. In verbal exams, this may be understand how the wording contrasts to find what pattern they are wanting to illicit from you.

Note: These are not hard or true numbers, but simply the type of pattern that may be used for the final score you are worried about.

[cookderosa]

College Board has a pdf that goes in depth about how scores are calculated. The link is password protected, and a little birdy gave me the password, so I will not share the pdf link HOWEVER, the basic run down is that REAL students in REAL college classes create the population that scaled scores are derived from. They take a sample of students who earned a "C" in their real class, they take a sample of students who earned a "B" in their real class, and so on. They give those groups the CLEP exams, and how they do is how College Board scales the scores. As to individual questions being weighted, I'm not sure if that's the case. I've never seen anything that would lead me to believe that, but I do know that some questions are unscored. The unscored questions are *probably* in testing for a future revision, which means that ACE won't allow them to be used for a grade.

Of course the answers to most of these questions are that their system/methods are proprietary and simply kept secret. We just don't know.

EDIT to add: the pdf is old, it's from 8-9 years ago, so exams modified since then could certainly use a new method.

[jadae@wgu.edu]

Interesting. That could (not would) mean that one could hit a favored line of guessing, and get 12 correct on top of that, and possibly pass. That's kind of a frustrating concept. I wish they gave more time for formula-driven exams.