Students Taking Advantage of CLEP Tests Consistently Outperform Their Peers

The College Board released research indicating that students that take CLEP (College Level Examination Program) tests are outperforming the students that have not taken these exams. The study reports that students who take CLEP exams generally have higher GPA's throughout their college career than students who take the correlative coursework through their college's traditional course enrollment. These results were not only confined to the GPA. Students that take CLEP exams also have higher graduation rates, take additional advanced coursework during their college career, and perform better in those additional courses taken.

This research has been a focus of political fire from college professors and other university faculty who believe that a CLEP should not be equivalent to the comparative coursework and that students who take CLEP exams perform poorly when they take more advanced classes. Many opponents of these tests also argue that these exams provide an unfairly easy path to a degree when compared to traditional classes.

These claims have been overturned by recent research. While the College Board admits there needs to be further studies conducted regarding CLEP testing, the current results are painting a bright picture for these credit-granting exams. Current research has also indicated that taking these exams increase students' GPA's in specific courses in which these exams are given. Some examples given in the recently released report comparing CLEP students and the exams' coursework counterparts concluded that CLEP students had higher mean GPA's in American Government (3.55 v 3.2), Calculus (3.39 v 3.24), and Psychology (3.66 v 3.10) to name a few.

This opposition gets more interesting as the same opponents of the College Level Examination Program are also advocates of utilizing AP (Advanced Placement) classes. This is primarily because AP coursework mirrors the traditional classroom. This has spurred continued research into the differences and similarities between the CLEP and AP options.

There has also been research into the College Level Examination Program that concluded that there was a high correlation between CLEP exam results and the actual grades that were received by students who took the coursework as well as taking a CLEP. Research has gone a long way to show that these tests are extremely accurate and helped to propel these tests to the mainstream in the late 1980's. However, this research has recently been ignored because contradicts the oppositions claims that CLEP tests are not correlative to taking traditional coursework.

While the controversy surrounding the College Level Examination Program will not dissipate anytime in the near future, the recent research will go a long way in making CLEP testing even more standardized. The reasons that students have chosen to take CLEP tests range from saving time and money to streamlining degree paths. Regardless of the reason, the College Level Examination Program seems to be here to stay and are being utilized by students more and more each year.