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CLEP College
Composition:
Study Guide

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Key Exam Details
The CLEP® exams allow you to demonstrate your knowledge of college-level material and earn
college credit without attending classes — you can use the knowledge you acquired through
military experience, work, or studying on your own at home.
The CLEP® College Composition exam will test your writing skills. The exam is comprised of 90
multiple-choice questions (95 minutes) that test your knowledge of composition and rhetoric,
Standard written English, and research and reference skills. Some questions are based on
reading passages and some stand alone.
The topics are broken down as follows:
• Revision skills: 40%
o Organization
o Evaluation of evidence
o Awareness of audience, tone, and purpose
o Level of detail
o Coherence between sentences and paragraphs
o Sentence variety and structure
o Main idea, thesis statements, and topic sentences
o Rhetorical effect and emphasis
o Use of language
o Evaluation of author’s authority and appeal
o Evaluation of reasoning
o Consistency of point of view
o Transitions
o Sentence-level errors relating to conventions of Standard written English
• Rhetorical analysis: 25%
o Appeals
o Tone
o Organization/structure
o Rhetorical effects
o Use of language
o Evaluation of evidence
• Ability to Use source materials: 25%
o Use of reference materials
o Evaluation of sources
o Integration of resource material

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o Documentation of sources (including MLA, APA, and the Chicago Manual of
Style )
• Conventions of Standard Written English: 10%
o Syntax (parallelism, coordination, subordination)
o Sentence boundaries (comma splice, run-ons, sentence fragments)
o Recognition of correct sentences
o Concord/agreement (pronoun reference, case shift and number; subject-verb;
verb tense)
o Diction
o Modifiers
o Idiom
o Active/passive voice
o Lack of subject in modifying word group
o Logical comparison
o Logical agreement
o Punctuation
Exam Details
Questions: 90 multiple-choice questions
Time Limit: 95 Minutes
Credits: 3*
*As recommended by the American Council on Education’s College Credit Recommendation Service (ACE CREDIT); check with your institution.
Revision Strategies
Questions covering revision strategies make up 40% of all test questions.
When drafting an essay, it is the writer’s duty to review her or his work to ensure that it is well
organized, well structured, appropriate for its intended audience, detailed, coherent, varied,
and consistent. If the essay falls short in any of these areas, it must be revised for maximum
effectiveness. The most sizable percentage of questions on the exam will test your ability to
recognize when writing needs to be revised and your knowledge of how to revise effectively.