SpanishHour.com Practice Test Score vs. Actual CLEP test scores

[VictorLustig]

Can anyone tell me how the SpanishHour.com practice test scores relate to the actual CLEP test scores? Would a 50% on a spanish hour test be some what close to a score of 50 on the actual CLEP test or are they nothing a like?

[meeksterisu]

Just took the test today and got a 55. I had zero Spanish experience before October, but spent 5 weeks in Guatemala at an immersion school, came back and worked with Rosetta Stone everyday for about a month and used SpanishHour and Petersen's practice tests. I would also listen to a few Spanish podcasts as well.

I was regularly scoring 80-85% on the Petersen and SpanishHour tests and found the actual exam to be much more difficult. I thought the audio portion would have been worse if I had not brought in my own headphones, but besides the poor audio quality, the question difficulty was similar. I tried writing down notes for the longer sections but would find that I would miss important things while I was writing.

I thought the written section in the Petersen and SpanishHour tests were way easier than the actual exam. The practice tests would have you pull passages word-for-word from the longer texts while the actual exam would ask a general question about what the text meant or what the author was trying to say, never anything word-for-word straight from the text. That messed me up a bit.

In the end I only needed a 50 to qualify for the Peace Corps so I'm happy, but I was sweating it out right before I hit the submit key for the final time. Good luck on your exam!

[sgloer]

Thanks for your feedback on SpanishHour, meeksterisu, although I think you would have gotten a lot more out of doing SpanishHour's 50-day course for a month than you got out of Rosetta Stone--at least as far as the CLEP exam is concerned. I say this because SH focuses a lot more on the grammar and the reading/writing of Spanish than Rosetta Stone does.

[meeksterisu]

Yeah, that I would believe. I guess it should have been mentioned that I found SpanishHour only a few days before I took the exam. I was only using the practice exams and did not complete the 50-day course.