InstaCert College Math CLEP Prep - a little disappointed

[jdbeck23]

Hi all, my first post. I signed up to InstaCert a few weeks back in an effort to study for my first of many CLEPs/DSSTs - College Math. Disclaimer - I have not done any real math since highschool (coming up on 20 years ago) so I knew that I needed all the help I can get. So my forthcoming review takes that into account, so you all don't think I'm being too harsh when I say I am a little disappointed with InstaCert preparation for my first test.

Score: 58 (a pass, and I'll take it! But I "felt" I was going to be in the 60s when I clicked the button)

CLEP Prep: The good. The breadth of the flashcards and the quality of the content was excellent. I quickly realized that I needed more of a "narrative" since it has been so long since I studied math at all. Also, they didn't teach Sets, Venn Diagrams, Probability, etc, back in the day so there was a significant amount of new information that I had to assimilate. Oddly enough I sat next to Math teacher on a plane last week while I was using InstaCert and looking for a good description of the break down of certain equations, and she recommended CK12.com for a free online text book type source. I found the website very helpful, as well as coolmath.com, mathisfun.com, khanacademy videos, purprlemath.... there really is a plethora of information out there which helped. But my primary prep was with InstaCert and I would recommend it to a friend in a heartbeat.

The not-so-good. I won't say the "bad" but the source of my disappointment was that the InstaCert content for this CLEP does not cover Financial Math, which is now 20% of the CLEP according to the description on the CLEP website. This content was surprisingly hard to find in a neat package. I believe I finally found a decent group of lessons on simple interest, compound interest, and continuous compound interest at coolmath. But for a paid service, I was surprised of the oversight and a little frustrated that I had to look so hard. There were a couple Standard Deviation questions in the test that were not covered, but since I paid so much attention to the writeup on the CLEP site, I used the above online sources to brush up on the basics for that as well.

Honestly, if I hadn't paid so much attention to CLEP writeup, and missed the opportunity to study the Financial math and other small outliers, I probably wouldn't have passed and that is what compelled me to post my experience.

Thanks,
Jesse

[bjcheung77]

If you still want to take more math courses to brush up or as a refresher, you can take ALEKS for practice and if you get 70% on their assessments, there are several that provide college credit for $20/month subscription.