Has the CLEP Introductory Psychology Test Changed?

Greetings,

This is my first post so we will see how it goes.

I am getting ready to lead a study group with about 12 highschool/college kids. We were planning on studying for the Introductory Psychology CLEP first, then moving on to other subjects. I have ordered the REA CLEP study guide for Introductory Psychology and was curious if we needed any other resources to pass?

I had also read somewhere that The College Board recently made some major changes to the Introductory Psychology CLEP, and that is why Excelsior doesn't offer a letter grade for it anymore. Has anyone taken it recently? Does the REA guide still cover enough of the material for us to pass?

Any input you all provide will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!
Heath

 

I've also heard that there is a new version of the CLEP Introductory Psychology exam. However, I just compared the contents of the outline they give on CollegeBoard website with an outline of an older copy of the study guide(year 2003) and the contents, as well as percentages allocated to each topic are exactly the same.
I guess that they simply updated the exam with new reasearch and some new questions, much the same way as new editions of textbooks.

You can also check out the current exam outline and compare it to the REA material here:
http://www.collegeboard.com/student/testing/clep/ex_ip.html

 

Hi Heath,

Grades are able to be assigned by Excelsior because College Board gave the exam to a sample group of students who also took the actual college course. Generally speaking, the average exam score of those students who scored an A in the course, thus becomes an A grade for those who take the CLEP in future.

Each CLEP exam you take includes several "pretest" questions. These are trial runs of questions that may appear on future versions of the exam. These questions are not counted toward your final score.

I imagine that phasing in new questions and phasing out older questions is a constant process. However, at some point, so many new questions will have been merged into the exam that it will no longer resemble the original sample exam that the grading was based on.

At that point, I would assume that College Board would need to re-issue the exam to a new sample group of college students in order to update their statistics and sample scores etc.

I believe that this is where the problem may have arisen with Excelsior. The grading scale they used for Intro to Psychology is no longer valid and College Board has either: not yet issued updated statistics from the sample group; or does not intend to do so.

As a result, Excelsior no longer has enough information to assign grades and must therefore resort to a pass/fail grade instead.

Make sense?

This is not gospel of course, I am just imagining a possible scenario by which Excelsior might decide to no longer assign grades.

However, even though many specific questions may now be different than those on older versions of the Intro to Psych exam, the knowledge required; the topics covered; and the weight given to each of the topics; remain unchanged. Therefore, I would think it is safe to assume that current versions of the study guides (such as REA) are still sufficient even though they may have been released prior to the exam being updated.

Hope that helps,
Beholdweb