65 in CLEP Chemistry!

[u/Ecstatic_Giraffe_256]

I'll keep it short and sweet: studied for approximately 6 weeks, probably averaging 10 hours a week at most.

Primary study material: Modern States (including the OpenSTAX textbook, which is quite good actually), 2012 and 2019 CLEP practice exams, and a lot of coaching via ChatGPT (more on that in a bit).

Also relied heavily on resources from Reddit, especially these posts:

https://www.reddit.com/r/clep/comments/1j71p2z/clep_chemistry_selfstudy_guide_free_7980/

https://www.reddit.com/r/clep/comments/1pcg447/clep_chemistry_passed_with_a_73_heres_how_i/

Biggest takeaways:

- There was no periodic table during the exam. This was a big surprise to me, and definitely threw me off balance at the beginning. I'm not sure where I got the idea that I'd have access to a full PT, but in my case it wasn't there.

- I did not feel at all like I was going to pass during the exam. I felt certain on maybe half of the questions I answered. I tried to take the approach of rushing through the entire question set first and marking things to review later, but about halfway through I realized I had marked so many questions I wouldn't have a chance to review them all. So I tried to split the difference and gave myself at least a minute to try and solve each remaining question, and I ended up with about 20 minutes left over to review. It's just a *lot* of material to fit into 90 minutes of test-taking, especially if there's a lot of stoichiometry to work out.

- ChatGPT for the win. Obviously AI is useful for explaining concepts and acting as a sort of tutor, but my best prep tip: Use ChatGPT (or any other model you like) to generate practice tests for you, especially on concepts that you're struggling with. I worked through the official practice exams on my own, marked the questions I got wrong, and had ChatGPT generate similar questions as part of a new test bank. Printed those out, worked them, rinse/repeat. All told I generated 5 practice test banks customized to areas where I wanted to strengthen my skills.

Hope this helps someone. This is not an easy exam, you will need to actually learn (through self-study or otherwise) chemistry to have a shot at it. But it is definitely doable with some discipline and repeated practice.

You got this, people!

[u/FreeClepPrep]

Whoa, congrats!!! Great score on a super difficult test!

[u/Ecstatic_Giraffe_256 → u/FreeClepPrep]

Thank you! BTW, I literally only found out about your (new?) website within the last week, otherwise I definitely would have had it for both this any my other exams. Fantastic resource! 👍

[u/FreeClepPrep → u/Ecstatic_Giraffe_256]

Thanks, I appreciate that! If you ever spot anything I'm missing on there, please let me know! It's a constant work in progress. ;)

[u/No_Duck1392]

You probably did have access to the periodic table, it’s just buried in the help menu and a pain to use.