New CLEP College Composition Exam

You can't know what the SAT or CLEP prompt will be in advance, but you can consider the possibilities. It's like a job interview. The interviewee doesn't know what questions the committee will ask -- and sometimes there is an element of surprise -- but interviewers tend to ask the same types of questions over and over. Thus job candidates who spend time rehearsing their responses to typical questions often perform better. The same holds true for standardized tests.

Look at the released SAT essay questions at The College Board Website or in The Official SAT Study Guide and the CLEP question on the Official CLEP Study Guide. You'll see that they all have something in common: They're about values. Some of the same values creep up again and again: for example, honesty, courage, success... The test makers will offer a quote that touches on some value issue. Then they will ask you a question and ask you to support your position with evidence. They state that the evidence can come from your own experience or from things you have read about or studied. They don't favor one type of support over another, but it is important that you have enough support -- in other words, that you write a well-developed essay.

There is no correct number of examples to include in your essay -- it depends on the level of development. (Do note that the CLEP test allows a longer time period for writing, and is somewhat more demanding than the SAT.) As you peruse sample essays, you will see that some students score well with an extended personal narrative, or an analysis of a single book. Generally this approach works if the example is something that is fresh in your memory or something you feel passionate about.

Here is an example: Recently I have been reading and teaching about the Holocaust. If I were tackling a prompt about honesty, I might write a whole essay about incidents in which people lied to save themselves or others from the Nazis. If I had just finished discussing a book from this era, for example, The Upstairs Room, I might write my whole essay on just that one memoir.

Don't worry that people will think that you don't value honesty if you write a paper focused on just those incidents where lying is justified. Often students do better when they let their examples drive their thesis. The College Board doesn't expect you to cover all aspects of a topic in a brief timed essay.

If you don't think you can write a couple pages on a single subject -- as is often the case -- you'll want to pick two or three examples to support your thesis. Returning to the honesty example, I might consider political figures whose lives have been mired in scandal because of dishonest acts, and select a couple that I know about: for instance, Richard Nixon and John Edwards.

Assignment: Brainstorm examples from personal experience, current events, history, or literature that relate to the theme of honesty.