Question about CLEP scoring

[xreva]

Hi everyone, this is my first time on these forums. I had a question about CLEP scoring.

I know when an exam says it needs a "50" for you to pass, it doesn't mean 50%. I am just starting to study for the "Analyzing and Interpreting Literature" exam. I got the CLEP study book and took a practice test just to see how much I know and what I should study. I ended up getting 48 out of the 80 questions correct... awful. But generally, would this score be good enough to pass? Or do you typically need to get 60+ questions correct to pass?

[publius2k4]

Hi everyone, this is my first time on these forums. I had a question about CLEP scoring.

I know when an exam says it needs a "50" for you to pass, it doesn't mean 50%. I am just starting to study for the "Analyzing and Interpreting Literature" exam. I got the CLEP study book and took a practice test just to see how much I know and what I should study. I ended up getting 48 out of the 80 questions correct... awful. But generally, would this score be good enough to pass? Or do you typically need to get 60+ questions correct to pass?

48 out 80 is definitely enough to pass.

Here is what the CLEP website says about scoring:

"To reach the total score that students see on their score reports, we perform two calculations.First, we calculate the "raw score." This is the number of questions answered correctly. The raw score increases by one point for each question answered correctly, and no points are gained or lost when a question is either unanswered or incorrectly answered.
Next, the raw score is converted into a "scaled score" by a statistical process called equating. Equating maintains the consistency of standards for test scores over time by adjusting for slight differences in difficulty between test forms. This ensures that the score does not depend on the specific test form or how well others did on the same form. The raw score is converted to a scaled score that ranges from 20 (lowest) to 80 (highest). The final scaled score is the score that appears on the score report."

Scoring | CLEP

[clep3705]

This site's search feature doesn't work well. Use Google, Bing, or whatever you prefer to search using a site restricted search like this:

clep scoring site:degreeforum.net

This has been discussed extensively. Some people believe that you need to get about half of the questions correct to pass based on 50 being the midpoint between the lowest score of 20 and the highest score of 80. That's just speculation. If you want to consider facts, the College Board has published passing percentages and some of us read those documents before they were taken down. The published passing percentages did cluster around 50% correct, sometimes less, sometimes more. One test came in at 60% to pass.

As a coworker correctly pointed out to me, scoring well above what it takes to pass means time wasted, time that could have been spent studying for the next test.

[BGSU_Alum_86]

I do not see how someone can say with 100% accuracy that answering 48 questions out of 80 would guarantee you at least a '50' on a CLEP exam. CLEP always has extra questions on each exam that are not scored. These could be retired questions (meaning you might see them on various practice tests), they could be questions that have not completed the process to be official questions, etc. Whatever the case, you will not know which questions are the ones that are not scored. These unknown questions cause a problem when someone asks what percentage of the questions need to be correct to achieve at least a 50. Well, you need a certain percentage answered correctly of those that are scored.

Confused? This is why I just encourage my testers to just do their best and not worry about a specific number.