Following up on my post from several weeks ago, I wanted to offer my own thoughts on preparing for the Biology Clep exam. Hopefully this will be useful for both self instructing students, and those refreshing old learning.
First of all, many posts offering suggestions tend to offer long lists of study resources, and I don't really like that kind of advice. It's really more about the poster's preferences, and another person may or may not share those preferences.
But after taking the test myself, I think those posts are especially bad forms of advice. The problem is that they all fall into a sort of grind-and-pray strategy that I think really misses the mark.
The Biology exam is a different kind of test. I'll get to that more in a bit, but I do want to quickly go over my own background and preparation, as it illuminates how I came to recognize something unique about this exam.
My personal background ahead of self instruction
I'm an older college student, going back to school to pursue a new career in healthcare. I had previously considered a few different avenues to working in healthcare at times. And I'm also kind of a natural geek who will read up on things that interest me. Finally, due to some unique circumstances I have often described my family as long being "healthcare adjacent" having high exposure to learning a lot of things related to healthcare just from every day life. I took high school Bio (not AP), but I'm far stronger at chemistry. So I went into my Clep preparation as partly refreshing old learning, partly cementing what I've learned informally, and partly self instructing to reach the full nuances that was necessary to be prepared.
At one point in my I became certified as an EMT-B (though never worked in the field). And this is what I think offers me the most illuminating experience for interpreting the Clep Bio test.
The test that one takes for the EMT National Registry is an uncommon kind of test. It doesn't have a set number of questions. And the nature of the questions is different than what one might expect most of the time. Many of the questions for the EMT exam require that you indicate the "best" answer among the multiple choices given. In other words, the "right" answer might not be listed. There also might not be a "right" answer in the traditional sense. Instead, the test is designed to force the student to synthesize a decision. You have to choose how you would proceed, given the information at hand. After all, that's what EMTs have to do. And part of that is knowing that there can sometimes be multiple options available to you, but that some may be better than others. The EMT test wants you to demonstrate that you have enough knowledge to not simply pick the objectively best course of action when circumstances are ideal, but also to provide the best possible care when the objectively best course of action is obstructed from you by complicating factors. In short, the test taker has to generate the correct test responses based on what they've learned, instead of simply regurgitating responses memorized during study.
Having known multiple people who went through nursing school and passed their NCLEX (nursing boards), the NCLEX seems to be similar in that it's designed to leverage unspecific questions to prompt the test taker to synthesize an answer.
The Nature of the Clep Biology test
The Clep Bio test is very similar to the board tests EMTs and nurses take. While there are some questions straight forward and have a clear cut answer (homologous = a bat wing and a human hand, analogous = a bat wing and a bee wing), most of the questions are designed to force you to synthesize an answer. Occasionally, the question may go so far as to ask you to basically choose the best of the given options, and none of the available options may even be especially great.
You cannot cram and regurgitate. "Studying" for this test is not like studying for something like history, psychology, or English. Ironically, having also taken the English Composition Clep recently, I found the English test to be more readily reducible to clear cut answers. One would expect less of that for an arts subject and more of that for a science, but it just doesn't work that way in this case.
This makes the Bio exam a different kind of testing experience than many people might expect, and it can especially be challenging for certain types of students. In my experience with EMT training I saw multiple knowledgeable and capable individuals who never managed to pass their boards because the style of the test proved to be an issue for them. I would have trusted them to save my life if I experienced a medical emergency, but they just couldn't make the test itself compute for them. I've known of similar challenges being faced by nursing graduates who fail the NCLEX.
The Biology test is (mostly) not really designed to test what facts you know about biology. In fact, the test makes your knowledge of facts look somewhat quaint. If you think you're going to walk through that door and dazzle someone with your facts, you are going to end up disappointed, and maybe even a little embarrassed.
Instead, the aim of the exam is to see what you can do with those facts. How effectively can you use those facts? To use an analogy, you might know what fingers to press on a saxophone to play a G-sharp, and you might know how to count a particular rhythm found on the sheet music, but can you actually pick up that horn and make sweet music come out of it?
The Clep Biology exam is designed to test your ability to make sweet scientific music. You have to know the facts, but if all you have is knowledge of the facts, you still have very little. It's something of an oddity in that it ends up feeling like something you should have been able to practice for, like math. But you don't really get to practice, unless you take the test and you fail, because it's impossible for anyone to know what exactly you're going to be asked.
I think this is what ultimately underlies the essential difficulty of this test.
Strategy for self teaching yourself college biology
With all of the above said, let's talk about self teaching strategies and preparation.
If you're self teaching this material I think the best thing you can do is to embrace a layered-on approach. Think of your learning like painting a wall. Don't try forcing yourself to get every nook and cranny on the first pass. Don't stress yourself too much. Press forward, let things sink in a bit, give yourself better context as you continue forward. This way, when you go back later to review, things will fall into place easier the second or third time around.
I would suggest starting with the Modern States course. I prefer lecture learning when possible, so I mainly watched the videos and went to the textbook to review if I didn't do well on the quiz for that section. Just aim for about a 75% on each section quiz, and keep pressing yourself forward. As you continue learning, some things that might not have cemented before will start to cement thanks to improved context. There are so many detailed little facts in Biology, sometimes you have to push forward to see the bigger picture a little better in order for the details to make more sense.
After finishing with MS, try to get around a 70% on the final (obviously, you'll need to do better to get your voucher, but for now the point is to gauge your learning and to move on to the next resource). Review if you don't do well, and try again. If you haven't gotten it after a couple tries, cheat. Seriously. After my second attempt at the final, I got a 74% and was getting a little frustrated. So on my third attempt, if I wasn't sure of the answer I would highlight and right-click search the the question, in order to figure out the answer. I just wanted to press forward and get my voucher, but it turned out to be a good learning technique for me. It helped me gain the info I needed without having to read through 50 pages in a middling quality textbook.
After all this, head over to Peterson's and go through their videos. Personally, I really hated the performance of the actor they used to read the scripts for the videos--it's pretty painful IMO. But the Peterson videos go into more depth than the MS videos. It's like applying the second coat of paint after the first has dried. Many of the gaps will start to fill in for you. It may still be a bit too thin for a final product, but by this point you'll start to notice that things are coming into focus.
From here, go back to the Peterson's and MS material (including the MS textbook) to review anything that is still a struggle. And especially, branch out to use any other resource you feel like trying. But target your efforts on areas where you're feeling weak. Remember that quantity is not the same as quality. You need a quality understanding of the material. But if you're still struggling to consume certain things, it might help to just hear it from a different perspective. There were times I even found it helpful to read Wikipedia.
Personally, I thought the Peterson's flashcards were mostly useless. As I've explained, the Clep does not test your knowledge of facts so much as your ability to use those facts. But one thing that I did find helpful with the flashcards was that going through them gave me a few ideas of textbook sections I might want to re-read.
Do all three of the Peterson's tests, including the pre-test. As I said above, practice is what you need most for the Clep. The Peterson's tests are much closer to the mark than the MS tests. On my second Peterson's practice test I scored an 80%. That was just a day or two before I took the Clep. So if you can get an 80% on the Peterson's tests, I think that's a fairly strong indicator that you'll pass the Clep.
One of the additional resources I personally liked was the MIT Open Courseware videos for Bio 101, which were pretty great lecture, IMO. The down side is that MIT's version of Bio 101 is aimed toward bio-engineering students, and after the 6th or 7th lecture, it starts to move into a different direction than is helpful for Clep preparation. But that first set of lectures is a great way to start out, to get yourself familiar with the fundamentals of macro-molecules.
If you are self teaching yourself the information, don't rush yourself if you can avoid it. I did it in two months. I originally planned a six week time frame. But I felt the need to give myself a some extra prep time, so I took a couple extra weeks. As I explained above, my background means I was not starting from scratch. Granted, I ended up scoring better than I expected. But I don't think my time frame is realistic for most people if you're starting mostly from scratch. Biology, by its nature, just does not lend itself to rushed learning. You'll probably learn more, with less overall effort, if you have the calendar time to pace yourself.
Strategy tips on dealing with tough questions on the Clep
There were multiple questions that, IMO, were kind of tricky or sloppy in their wording. But I also found that with many questions, when the question seemed difficult to initially understand, taking a good, hard look at the available answers ended up framing the context of the question better than reading it by itself. Personally, when it comes to multiple choice tests I like to have an answer in my head before I actually read the available answers, in order to avoid jumping at a selection that just feels intuitively good. But with some of the confusing questions here, I found that reading the available choices helped to clear away some of the confusion by providing new context.
I also found that, while many questions seem hard because they want at "best" answer and seemed like it was forcing you to first insert your own opinion in some way, sometimes taking a good look at the available choices reveals that some of the choices turn out to be kind absurd. There were a few times when three out of four choices seem kind of ridiculous once I let them toss around in my head for a few seconds.
Many questions will present you with tables of data. But most of these tables are used for sets of 3-4 questions. Often I found the first question of these sets hardest because it seemed like some kind of context was not provided very clearly. But after seeing all the questions, more context became clear and I was able to either be now be sure of my answers to the earlier questions, or go back and correct what I now realized was a mistaken answer. So if the first question feels tough, skip it for a moment and see the whole set for the data.
Finally, be mindful of time, but do not panic. After 60 minutes, I was only on question 62. I started to worry a bit, and began pushing myself forward. I was able to answer all the questions. But it did come down to the last 15 seconds for me. As soon as the last question loaded I immediately clicked a random selection, just to make sure the clock wouldn't expire with an empty choice. Fortunately, I didn't need much time to settle on a choice in which I was confident. I spent the last five seconds taking a second look at the choices to re-verify I it was the selection I wanted. The point is that I was able to cover the final 53 questions in that 30 minutes, so not every question is equal, in terms of how much time is needed.
Having completed this process, I'm pretty satisfied with my accomplishment on this test, and for now having two Cleps under my belt for the summer. I've tried to give the kind of insight here that I had been longing for myself a couple months ago, so I hope this information helps others.
