CLEP Exams

College Level Proficiency Exam Policies

• CLEP exams (College Level Proficiency Exams) are intended to allow students to receive credit for knowledge that has not previously been awarded college credit.
• Credit is only awarded for subject exams, not for general exams. General exams, such as “Humanities”, address broad areas of knowledge. Subject exams, such as “Principles of Microeconomics”, address specific subject areas. A list and description of all CLEP exams is available on the CLEP website.
• An exam that achieves the credit granting score will receive 4 credits. The only exception is a foreign language exam score at the second level, which will receive 8 credits. Please see the CLEP website for an explanation of the scoring system.
• Harpur College does not grant composition credit on an exam basis; therefore a student cannot obtain writing credit for a CLEP exam.
• Students who have earned credit for a higher level course will not receive credit for a CLEP exam that implies/requires knowledge of lower-level material. For example, a student with college-level credit for Calculus would not receive credit for the Pre-Calculus or College Algebra CLEP exams.
• Since it is important that earlier college level work not be duplicated, students should always submit a transfer credit petition from our "Forms & Petitions" page before taking a CLEP exam.