Whether you go to a public school like Washington State University, or a private school like New York University, you are going to need to take college placement exams at the beginning of your freshman year. College placement exams are used to determine your skill level in different subject areas and establish which courses you will need to take in order to start fulfilling your general education requirements during.
The tests that you take, however, will depend on the school that you are attending and the major that you have declared, if indeed, you have already declared your major. If you want to have a shorter graduation trajectory, it’s important that you perform well on these tests.
If you don’t perform well on any one of your college placement exams, then you could be required to take some of the more rudimentary courses that you either already know, or took in high school. If you are simply not capable of mastering these concepts during study before the college placement exams, then the requirement of taking some rudimentary courses might be very good and necessary.
The purpose of this process is to make sure that you are ready for all of the courses that you will need to pass in order to graduate. It just may mean that your graduation date will be delayed a little bit more than you may have hoped. However, it’s better than dropping out because you don’t feel as though you’re ready to earn a bachelor’s degree.
Once you know which exams you’re going to be taking, you should start studying right away. A lot of students hear that the exams aren’t that difficult and then they don’t take them too seriously. However, when you take your placement exams, you’re going to be testing for several hours and it’s not uncommon for the mental fatigue to kick in after a little while and it can be more difficult to access a lot of basic information from your brain.
That’s why it’s important that the information is fresh on your mind. You should study for at least a few hours before you jump into your placement exams, no matter how smart you are. If you’ve looked at practice tests and you are feeling nervous, you should definitely find a friend to study with and take those practice tests as long as you need to until you get the material down.
Once you’ve completed your college placement exams, you will be given a list of courses that you will need to enroll in for your freshman year. You will also be given a date and time when you will be eligible to register for all of your classes. Be sure that you are ready to register for each and every one of those classes when your window opens up, because a lot of other people will want them as well, and you want to be sure you can get all of them over with during your freshman year. If you don’t, then you could end up putting several of your other classes on hold in the next year because you haven’t yet completed all of your prerequisites.
