ACCUPLACER study guide
ACCUPLACER · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
ACCUPLACER is a placement assessment from College Board that helps colleges and workforce training providers gauge student readiness for required coursework and identify areas where students may need additional support to succeed. It is not an admissions exam: it is a placement tool, used by two-year and four-year institutions, workforce training programs, and Ability to Benefit (ATB) contexts to decide which courses a student should start in and where extra support may help. Because institutions set their own course placement scores, the same ACCUPLACER result can lead to different placements at different schools - always confirm the cut scores and rules at the institution you plan to attend. The assessment covers reading, writing, and mathematics, and there are separate ESL tests that include essays for English-language learners. The ACCUPLACER study guide has 4 sections and about 1,233 words.
01Reading: Main Idea, Detail, Inference, and Tone
ACCUPLACER Reading passages are short - roughly 50 to 150 words - and usually informational or argumentative. Almost every item belongs to one of six buckets: main idea, explicit detail, inference, vocabulary in context, author's purpose or tone, and the relationship between two ideas (contrast, cause and effect, example).
337 words, about 2 min02Writing: Sentence Boundaries, Agreement, and Clarity
Writing items test standard edited English: complete sentence boundaries, subject-verb agreement, pronoun agreement and case, consistent verb tense, correct modifiers, parallel structure, punctuation (comma, semicolon, colon, apostrophe), transitions, and conciseness. Many questions are rhetorical - you choose the revision that best supports a stated goal for the paragraph, so read the prompt line above the choices.
307 words, about 2 min03Mathematics: Arithmetic Through Advanced Algebra
The math test spans arithmetic (fractions, decimals, percents, ratios, unit rates), elementary algebra (linear equations and inequalities, slope, systems, exponents, polynomials, factoring), and advanced topics (quadratic and rational expressions, functions and function notation, radicals, geometry, and basic probability and statistics). Order of operations with negatives.
274 words, about 1 min04ESL: Reading Skills, Language Use, Listening, and Essay
Passages are short and practical. Expect main-idea, detail, sequence, vocabulary-in-context, and simple inference questions.
315 words, about 2 min