Though CLEP exams don’t award letter grades, it’s fun to look up what your teen’s score might have been if it were assigned a letter grade. This table tells you.
“The American Council on Education (ACE) recommends a credit-granting score of 50 for each CLEP exam. This is a scaled score, equivalent to earning a C in the relevant course.”
Sometimes the language of the score guide causes panic instead of reassurance.
Parents want to know if scoring a 50 means their teen should get a “C” grade on their homeschool transcript. NO!! That is not what it means!
CLEP exams each vary in how the scale was designed, and the number of correct needed also differs between exams (College Board keeps that number confidential; you will never know how many questions you missed or got correct on your CLEP exam).
Here is what College Board will tell us
“The corresponding raw score (number of questions answered correctly) is determined after a panel of college faculty who teach the equivalent course perform a detailed and rigorous review of exam content.”
In other words, the faculty estimate that a student who earns a “B” in their course would probably get X number of questions correct on this exam. Don’t read too much into this. It’s literally just an opinion and a guess.
Though not impossible, colleges rarely award a letter grade for your teen’s CLEP score. In the 15 years I’ve closely followed CLEP policy, I’ve seen this fewer than 5 times. You should expect CLEP credit to be recorded as “cr” which means “credit” and for it to be excluded from the GPA calculation.
One final thought about how to use this chart. If you look up the CLEP scores at a target college and see numbers higher than 50, you can get a sense of “how much higher” they’ll need to be by looking at this chart. If a target college is asking for 70’s across the board, that’s not going to happen. They are essentially setting the bar so high that no one can reasonably do it. In other words, they are telling you that they don’t “really” accept CLEP even though they want to advertise like they do. If this is the case and your student plans to use CLEP towards a degree, you might want to find a more test-friendly college or see if they are more test-friendly with Advanced Placement (AP) since it would be easier to score a 3 on an AP exam than 70 on a CLEP.
This chart is from the College Board’s website, “For Colleges” section
| Exam Title | B-Level Score | C-Level Score |
|---|---|---|
| Financial Accounting | 65 | 50 |
| Information Systems | 66 | 50 |
| Introductory Business Law | 57 | 50 |
| Principles of Management | 63 | 50 |
| Principles of Marketing | 65 | 50 |
| Exam Title | B-Level Score | C-Level Score |
|---|---|---|
| American Literature | 53 | 50 |
| Analyzing and Interpreting Literature | 59 | 50 |
| College Composition | 59 | 50 |
| College Composition Modular | 60 | 50 |
| English Literature | 63 | 50 |
| Humanities | 55 | 50 |
| Exam Title | B-Level Score | C-Level Score |
|---|---|---|
| American Government | 64 | 50 |
| History of the United States I | 61 | 50 |
| History of the United States II | 60 | 50 |
| Human Growth and Development | 58 | 50 |
| Introduction to Educational Psychology | 63 | 50 |
| Introductory Psychology | 55 | 50 |
| Introductory Sociology | 56 | 50 |
| Principles of Macroeconomics | 62 | 50 |
| Principles of Microeconomics | 64 | 50 |
| Social Sciences and History | 63 | 50 |
| Western Civilization I | 55 | |
| Western Civilization II | 54 |
| Exam Title | B-Level Score | C-Level Score |
|---|---|---|
| Biology | 56 | 50 |
| Calculus | 64 | 50 |
| Chemistry | 66 | 50 |
| College Algebra | 63 | 50 |
| College Mathematics | 63 | 50 |
| Natural Sciences | 66 | 50 |
| Precalculus | 61 | 50 |
