CLEP Humanities study guide
CLEP Humanities · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The CLEP Humanities exam is a College Board credit-by-examination test that measures general knowledge of literature, art, music, and the other performing arts from classical antiquity to the contemporary period. It is aimed at students who already read widely, visit museums, attend concerts, or have taken survey courses, and who want to earn college credit toward a distribution or general-education requirement without sitting through a full course. The CLEP Humanities study guide has 8 sections and about 3,341 words.
01Literature: Drama
The drama portion of the CLEP Humanities exam asks you to recognize dramatic genres and conventions, place plays and playwrights in their periods, and read a short plot description or quoted speech to identify the technique at work. The Poetics supplies most of the exam's critical vocabulary: hamartia (the protagonist's error), peripeteia (reversal), anagnorisis (recognition), and catharsis (purgation of pity and fear).
408 words, about 2 min02Literature: Poetry
The poetry questions test prosody (meter, rhyme, stanza form), figurative language, and the ability to place a poet or poem in a period or movement. An iamb is unstressed-stressed; a trochee is the reverse; an anapest is two unstressed plus a stress; a dactyl is a stress plus two unstressed.
426 words, about 2 min03Literature: Fiction
The fiction questions ask about narrative technique, above all point of view, plus structure, characterization, and the major movements of the novel and short story. First person : the narrator says I, is limited to personal knowledge, and may be unreliable.
417 words, about 2 min04Literature: Nonfiction (including philosophy)
The nonfiction questions cover the essay as a form, its rhetoric and practitioners, and a survey of Western philosophy that rewards matching a doctrine to a thinker. Montaigne invented the essay as a skeptical, digressive form; Bacon wrote compressed aphoristic essays; Addison and Steele's Spectator shaped the periodical essay.
417 words, about 2 min05Visual arts: painting, sculpture, etc.
The visual arts questions ask you to identify style, period, medium, and technique from a described work, and to use formal-analysis vocabulary precisely. Elements include line, shape, form, value, color (hue, value, intensity), texture, and space.
384 words, about 2 min06Visual arts: architecture
The architecture questions test structural vocabulary, the classical orders, and the ability to place a building in a style from its described features. Post-and-lintel construction spans openings with horizontal beams; the arch (round in Roman work, pointed in Gothic) and the vault (barrel, groin, rib) carry loads in compression.
409 words, about 2 min07Performing arts: music
The music questions test the elements and terms of Western music, standard forms, and period style, usually by describing a work or asking which composer belongs to a movement. Melody, harmony, rhythm, meter, tempo, dynamics, and timbre are the basic elements.
435 words, about 2 min08Performing arts: film, dance, etc.
The film and dance questions split into film technique (shot, editing, sound, movement) and dance history, where you must match a choreographer or work to a style. Shot scales run extreme long, long or establishing, medium, close-up, extreme close-up.
445 words, about 2 min