Course

The CLEP Spanish with Writing Exam measures listening, reading, and writing skills taught in most first-year and second-year Spanish Language courses at the college level. The exam contains multiple-choice questions that measure Interpretive Language skills (Listening and Reading) and two writing tasks that measure Interpersonal and Presentational communication. One writing task asks the student to write an e-mail to a friend, relative, or other acquaintance. This is an example of Interpersonal Writing. The student will have 10 minutes to write the e-mail, and the response should contain at least 60 words. The second writing task asks the student to write a brief composition on a given topic. This is an example of Presentational Writing. The student will have 20 minutes to write the brief composition, and the response should contain at least 100 words. Each writing task will be scored based on the content and grammatical accuracy of the response.

The compositions are scored twice monthly by college Spanish faculty from throughout the country via an online scoring system. Each of the two writing tasks is scored independently by at least two different readers, and the scores are then combined. The multiple-choice section score and writing score are then combined to yield the candidate’s exam score. The resulting combined score is reported as a single scaled score between 20 and 80. The CLEP Spanish exam contains 100 multiple-choice questions to be answered in 80 minutes and two writing tasks to be written in 30 minutes, for a total of 110 minutes testing time.