All official tests are written by private organizations. Some of the state tests for lower grades - not end of course - are frequently written with significant state input. Tests such as the Stanford, Iowa, SAT/ACT's are not only professionally written, but are standardized to a specific age group and the testing data is available for anyone who wishes to analyze the data construct.
CLEP is written by the same folks who handle AP's and SAT's. It is a good option for kids with broad background knowledge, especially in the liberal arts and basic sciences. As with AP's, it is up to the colleges to decide how the tests are used within their organization. Thankfully, my daughter was able through AP's to satisfy her history, English, and cross-curricular requirements and is entering her college 3 credits shy of a second semester sophomore. She actually satisfied her basic science and math requirements, but is choosing to retake just to make sure she has the foundation the school requires.
The GED is written by the American Council of Education, which is an organization of about 2000 colleges and universities. The only problem with GED's is the fraud that is prevalent. There are quite a few organizations that claim to represent the ACE, and offer an on-line version of the GED, and that is a huge red flag. Unfortunately, I know about a dozen or so kids that after bragging how easy the GED was, found out they were defrauded and a couple of them just gave up in disgust and never completed the GED program or earned a diploma.
Thanks for all the information. I didn’t know about the GED frauds. I’ll be sure to watch out for them.
I would suspect that a homeschooler who was able to do well on CLEP and the ACT/SAT would be accepted by many, if not most, colleges regardless of age, wouldn't you think?
It seems like every year or so we hear of some child being accepted into college at 10 or 11. The colleges must have some way of judging the skills of those children.
I have a friend going through getting her GED, I was totally unaware of this. I will be informing her of this.
I've been trying to help her out with quizzing, etc, but there is much of the stuff that even I don't know, especially when it comes to math and science.