The Top 3 Study Guides for CLEP Tests - Reviewed

1) Textbooks.

Textbooks for CLEP tests come in all shapes and sizes. While it is entirely possible to just pick up a random college textbook from a random year on the subject that you're going to be tested on and go on to pass the test - many people do just that - you'll have to learn a whole lot of extra stuff that isn't going to be on the test just to be safe. I don't know about you, but I work full time and most of my studying time is in evenings, mornings, and 3-a.m.-coffee-induced-frenzies, and honey, I ain't got time to learn stuff that isn't going to count towards my degree yet! (Pausing here to note that if you are a med student or whatever, please be more serious about your learning than I am. I'm going for a sort of arbitrary "starter degree" in business, so it's not that big a deal.) The books that I have found to be the most concise and clear and kinda sorta cheap are the REA CLEP prep books. Unless my next CLEP is something super easy like analyzing and interpreting literature or human growth and development, I've gotten to where I just order the REA book in advance and have it before I even set the test date, that way I can just dive in and get to work.

These books run from 15-30 dollars, and are available sometimes secondhand. Secondhand = Cheaper.

The main benefit that I found from the REA books, as opposed to the two others listed below, is the mental picture they give me of the people involved and the timeline of events in a given subject. For example, I took a sociology CLEP test after studying it only on InstantCert and I passed it but because flashcards were the only thing that I had for names of the many, many, many people involved in the history of sociology, I forgot some people and had a very vague timeline in my head of when different ideas were introduced or integrated into working systems. The REA books combat that, because I get the story, and they follow a basic timeline of events for everything except the more mathematical things where there really aren't many people involved.


2) SpeedyPrep.com

SpeedyPrep costs 20 dollars a year, making it relatively cheap, and it has sections for studying every CLEP test which currently exists. It's basically just flashcards, and it will tell you how many you got wrong vs. right and you're allowed to go back over sections as much as you want. The questions are almost like a fake test. If you read all the answers and retain the information in them, you will have enough information to pass a CLEP test. A lot of people like SpeedyPrep and it is easy to navigate.

3) InstantCert.com

InstantCert is 20 dollars a month and has everything SpeedyPrep has in addition to a students forum which I have found immensely helpful. It also has options to label flashcards not as right or wrong, but as "don't know," "kinda know," and "mastered." These questions are then marked with different colors and you can go back to them to figure it out. It also shows you the percentage of each tagged option that you have gone through so you can see that you have, according to yourself, "mastered" 30% of the information given or 50% or so forth. I like the questions on InstantCert better than on SpeedyPrep as well. They are geared more to teach, and less like a psuedo-test.


How I Study With Flashcards Vs. Books


I can read super fast which is cool but then sometimes while I'm reading I'll get on page number three before I realize that I didn't really listen to anything that the little voice of myself in my head was reading and I need to start all over. This is mildly annoying, usually, but it's not ok for studying.

For studying with books, I read with about five different colored highlighters on hand. I mark EVERYTHING and color code chunks of connected information so that when I glance at the page later I can go, "Oh, all this pink stuff is about such-and-such-a-subject and those four purple words are the key terms that I should read over again." I also keep a notebook on hand and write down key words, terms, people, and events that I want to remember. Later on, I highlight those notes. Then, I either make flashcards out of paper or on Quizlet (totally free and works on your phone, has matching games too. TRY IT OUT!) Sometimes I also print out a very, very abridged version of the wikipedia page for a prominent figure in the subject and stick a photo of him/her on it and something catchy that will help me remember. Like one figure in the subject that I'm studying now (CLEP Psychology) is named John Watson and so I put a picture of the fictional Sherlock Holmes on the page I printed out, because his sidekick was also named John Watson in the books. Then I study the flashcards, glance through the book once or twice before the test, and I'm good to go.


With Flashcards, it's a wee bit different. I like to read the flashcard, and if it is remotely unfamiliar or if I could have possibly gotten it wrong, I copy it all down by hand into a notebook. It helps, sometimes, to reword the flashcard and use more layman terminology or jazz it up with extra words. The point is that rephrasing in your own words will help to get the information into your mind.

Step 2, I highlight those notes, being especially careful to make whatever information is still not immediately obvious to me VERY VISIBLE!!

Step 3, I make as many of the notes that I am having trouble remembering as I can into flashcards on Quizlet. Then I study the new flashcards that I just made, in my own words, of the main information that I need to remember gleaned from the rest of the heap, and maybe watch some Crash Course YouTube videos on the subject or read up on some Wikipedia, etc. and when I feel confident enough in my knowledge, I take the test.

May the luck o' the Irish be with ye! Break a leg.

:)