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College Composition

The College Composition contains multiple-choice items and two mandatory, centrally scored essays. College English faculty from throughout the country convene twice a month to score the essays via an online scoring system. Each of the two essays is scored independently by two different readers, and the scores are then combined. This combined score is weighted approximately equally with the score from the multiple-choice section. These scores are then combined to yield the candidate's score. The resulting combined score is reported as a single scaled score between 20 and 80. Separate scores are not reported for the multiple-choice and essay sections. College Composition contains approximately 50 multiple-choice items to be answered in 50 minutes and two essays to be written in 70 minutes, for a total of 120 minutes testing time.

The exam measures writing skills needed for college assignments and in writing tasks that explain, interpret, analyze, present, or support a point of view.

The material covered in this exam measures the skills required in most first-year college composition courses. Students should consider attempting this exam if they recognize the acceptable usage relating to:

  • sentence boundaries
  • economy and clarity of expression
  • agreement: subject/verb, verb tense, pronoun reference, shift, number
  • active/passive voice
  • diction and idiom
  • syntax: parallelism, coordination, subordination, dangling modifiers
  • sentence variety.

Computer-based Scoring: CLEP computer-based (CBT) exams are scored without a penalty for incorrect guessing. The raw score of the multiple choice section--the number of correct responses--is translated into a scaled score. The essay portion of this exam is scored once a month. After scoring, it is combined with the scaled score from the multiple-choice section. The resulting combined score is reported in a range from 20 to 80. Scores for each section are not reported.

At Ferris, candidates taking the College Composition exam must score a 50 or higher to earn credit.

Course(s) and Credits

  • ENGL 150
    3 credits