What
is The College-Level Examination Program (CLEP)? The
College-Level Examination Program® or CLEP provides students of any
age with the opportunity to demonstrate college-level achievement through
a program of exams in undergraduate college courses. There are 2,900 colleges
that grant credit and/or advanced standing for CLEP exams. Before
you take a CLEP exam, check directly with the college or university you
plan to attend to make sure that it grants credit for the CLEP exam(s)
you wish to take, and review the specifics of the institution's CLEP policy.
At the time you take the exam, you can indicate in test software the college,
employer, or certifying agency that you want to receive your CLEP test
scores. There is no additional cost for this service — your exam
fee covers it. If you did not indicate a score recipient institution at
the time of your exam and you want to request your CLEP scores, you can
do so by ordering a CLEP Transcript. This Transcript is a cumulative score
report of all the CLEP exams you have taken and the scores you earned
in the last 20 years.
CLEP exams are developed and evaluated independently and are not linked
to each other except by the Program's common purpose, format, and method
of reporting results. For this reason, direct comparisons should not be
made from one CLEP exam to another. Nor are CLEP scores comparable to
SAT® scores or scores of other tests that use similar scales.[read
more]
Dumbing Us Down: The
Dead Students Society by Amy Cortez - Editor,
The Eclectic Telegraph Well
now that the election is over and a new batch of rascals are "in"
perhaps we can get back to status quo, where what we read and hear on
radio and see on TV doesn't offend or make us think. Our society is not
set up to encourage people to think. Resistance is futile, especially
as the dumbing down process started when we were in elementary school
and continues through to high school. If our college days don't snap us
out of it, we are are then right on schedule to be the citizen our politicians
want us to be. I wondered if anyone else feels the way I do. Here's what
I found:
Most
of my friends would agree that this is the daily reality of a high
school student. You spend so much time "learning," yet
learn so little. Education is not built around inspiring interest
or provoking thought, but memorizing facts. It's as if tennis balls
are being thrown at your head. They bounce right off, leaving only
faint impressions that last until test time, when they fade away.
For example, history, the way it was taught to me, was one extensive
board note, and each class seemed longer than the era it was covering.
Abstract facts are meaningless until they're given an intellectual
or emotional charge that makes you want to learn...[read
on]
...A
large part of public curriculum is devoted to shaping attitudes
and beliefs into a relativist, socialist mind set rather than educating
the students in the solid education and the classics which served
a previously-literate country well for generations. This accounts
for the glassy look that so many public school students exhibit
-- nothing going on upstairs. In talking with them, many of them
would like to have something going on but just don't know what or
how because their dialectic public education didn't teach them to
achieve it. The bottom line on the dialectical is group think. Without
a group, the individuals can't think.....
"The
moment teens leave high school, the majority of the so-called socialization
in an artificial environment is found to be worthless. No one cares
about their, feelings, socialization or image. “What can you
do?” and “what do you know?” are the real questions.
Once public schoolers emerge from high school, they discover that
all the socialization skills they learned in dealing with peer pressure
don't apply in the real world. Meanwhile the inter-age communication
skills they need are sorely lacking. Most government schoolers I
have met can't read, think, express themselves clearly and concisely,
have little knowledge of anything from history to politics, and
have a very distorted view of both history and society imposed upon
them by a radical leftist curriculum.....[read
on]
Excerpts:
Something is amiss in the great nation called America. Ominous sirens
warning this reality can be heard emanating loudly through invisible
winds of change circulating our towns and cities. The American people
are being strangulated; unbeknownst to the masses they are being
transformed and conditioned, becoming the entity the elite have
long sought, the culmination of decades of social engineering designed
to make of hundreds of millions the slaves of times past and the
automatons of the future....
The
education system in America has been carefully eroded over the course
of time, altered in such a way as to make creative and curious children
barren and submissive adults indifferent to the world around them.
The system now in place begins robbing a child’s ability to
think for himself or herself from the very start of the education
process. The class structure itself eliminates individuality, personality
and energetic ability, as one teacher must educate many students
competing for attention...[read
on]
Dumbing
Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves
But Can't Read, Write, or Add
by Charles J. Sykes
Book
Description:
Nowhere has the flight from quality plaguing American life these
days been more obvious than in our primary and secondary schools
-- on the whole, the graduates seem less well-read and less well-spoken,
less knowledgeable and less able to compute. In this book, Charles
Sykes asks why, and lays most of the blame at the feet of the trainers
of teachers, the writers of textbooks and the educational policy
wonks who influence them. He convincingly shows that in many different
school systems, and in many different academic fields, with the
help of goofy text-books, watered-down requirements and "recentered"
test grade scales, American students have come to value feeling
good about a subject over being good in it.
The
Conspiracy of Ignorance: The Failure of American Public Schools
by Martin L. Gross
Book Description:
Martin L. Gross has made a career out of books that attack "the
establishment," whether it be the medical community (The Doctors)
or the general powers that be (The Government Racket). In The Conspiracy
of Ignorance, he takes aim at a lumbering, elephant-sized target:
public education. Armed with statistics and research papers--the
Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) and the
National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) being his most
prominent sources--Gross rails against the declining performance
of U.S. students. While his criticisms--which encompass everything
from teachers' unions to "useless" education degrees,
PTAs, psychological services in schools, even honor roll bumper
stickers--are not new, they make an imposing indictment when presented
all together.
The
Feel-Good Curriculum: The Dumbing-Down of America's Kids in the
Name of Self-Esteemby Maureen, Ph.D. Stout
Book Description:
Maureen Stout isn't the first to attack self-esteem boosters in
public schools, and she won't be the last. The question is: Do such
creatures actually still exist? Stout, an assistant professor of
educational leadership and policy studies at California State University-Northridge,
uses many of her graduate students to illustrate the fallout from
the self-esteem movement, which hit its heyday in the 1980s and
early '90s. She portrays her pupils--tomorrow's teachers--as spoiled
brats who can't spell and feel entitled to grades they haven't earned.
Her fellow professors are painted as bovine, unoriginal thinkers.
It doesn't instill much confidence in the future of our education
system--but it's not meant to. Stout attacks the basic tenets of
the self-esteem movement, blasting it for lowering expectations,
belittling competition, and turning schools into centers for therapy,
not learning.
The
Schools We Need: And Why We Don't Have Them
by E.D. Hirsch Jr.
Schools do a lousy job of transmitting "core knowledge"
to their students, he says. To improve, they must abandon all of
their feel-good theories about "critical thinking" and
work harder to endow kids with intellectual capital at an early
age. It may sound like common sense, but this important book shows
why so many educators appear to have lost theirs.
by Charlotte Thompson Iserbyt
