Course Overview

The English Composition (with or without Essay) CLEP exam is designed to test writing skills that a student would typically learn in a first-year college composition course. InstantCert's course prepares you for the multiple choice portion of the exam, focusing on sentence-level composition skills; students taking the version that includes an essay will need to prepare for the essay-writing portion using other resources.

Topics Covered in This Course

Basic Grammar

Parts of speech
Independent / dependent clauses
Incomplete sentences and run-on sentences
Combining sentences

Identifying Sentence Errors, Improving Sentences, and Restructuring Sentences

Sentence boundaries
Clarity of expression
Agreement: subject-verb; verb tense; pronoun reference, shift, number
Syntax: parallelism, coordination, subordination, dangling modifiers
Sentence variety

Customer Test Results for the English Compostition CLEP

65 users submitted test results since January, 2009
57 of those users reported a passing score (88%)


The following are a sample of the test results submitted by members who’ve taken the English Composition CLEP exam after using InstantCert’s study program. These are unfiltered, unedited results and this list is automatically updated to show the ten most recent results:

August 28, 2010 User  passed with a score of 58 out of 80
July 27, 2010 User  passed with a score of 54 out of 80
July 24, 2010 User  failed with a score of na out of 80
July 21, 2010 User  passed with a score of 61 out of 80
July 21, 2010 User  passed with a score of 62 out of 80
June 22, 2010 User  passed with a score of 68 out of 80
June 15, 2010 User  passed with a score of 61 out of 80
June 9, 2010 User  failed with a score of 48 out of 80
June 1, 2010 User  passed with a score of 61 out of 80
May 20, 2010 User  failed with a score of 48 out of 80

Free Sample Questions For The English Composition CLEP

Get a taste of the InstantCert study experience with five actual flashcards pulled from our database. Remember, you're not expected to know anything about the subject beforehand. Just read the question, think about what the answer might be (typing it is optional), and then click "Continue" when you're ready to see the answer and explanation.

Question 1 of 5

She served hamburgers to the children on paper plates.

Type the letter corresponding to the error you see in the above sentence:
A) Misplaced Modifier
B) Pronoun Error
C) Subject/Verb Agreement Error
D) Parallel Construction Error
E) Faulty Comparison
F) Redundancy
G) No error


Your Answer:  

Related Exams with Overlapping Subject Matter

The following exams have a significant amount of overlap with the English Composition exam, so you should consider taking them back-to-back or studying for them at the same time: