CLEP American Literature vs English Literature: Which Should You Take?

Take English Literature if you have genuinely read British literature: it is worth 6 semester hours, double American Literature's 3, and it passed 40 percent of military test takers against American Literature's 27 percent, the lowest rate of any CLEP exam. American Literature is only the right choice if your degree plan specifically requires the American credit. And if you simply need a literature requirement filled with no strong background either way, neither of these is your best move: the third CLEP literature exam, Analyzing and Interpreting Literature, pays the same 3 credits as American Literature, requires no memorization at all, and passes 69 percent.

That is the recommendation. Here is the reasoning, because the two exams differ in more ways than the titles suggest, and one of the differences changed recently enough that most of the internet still has it wrong.

The comparison at a glance

The biggest difference: one of them is worth twice as much

If you read nothing else here, read this. CLEP English Literature is worth 6 semester hours. CLEP American Literature is worth 3. Same fee, same 90 minutes in the chair, double the credit.

This is a recent change, which is why so many study guides and forum posts still get it wrong. The American Council on Education, whose recommendations colleges follow when awarding CLEP credit, doubled the English Literature recommendation from 3 credits to 6, effective February 1, 2024. ACE's National Guide record for the exam (ACE ID CLEP-0016) shows both periods side by side: the entry covering December 2018 to January 2024 recommends 3 semester hours, and the current entry, running to the end of 2029, recommends 6. College Board's live exam page agrees: credit-granting score 50, semester hours 6.

American Literature (ACE ID CLEP-0010) did not change. It remains 3 semester hours.

So on pure credit efficiency, English Literature is not just better, it is twice as good. And here is the sharp edge of it: the exam that pays double is also the exam more people pass. Normally you expect to trade difficulty for reward. Here you do not.

One caution before you bank on it. Both of College Board's own downloadable fact sheets for English Literature still say 3 credits. They are dated 2010 and 2017 and have never been updated. Your college sets its own award policy and may not have caught up either, so check your institution's CLEP credit table before you register expecting 6. The ACE recommendation is what most colleges follow, but "most" is not "all."

What each exam actually asks you to do

Both are survey exams over a national tradition, and both mostly ask you to read. But they lean differently, and the lean decides which one suits you.

American Literature leans toward reading; English Literature leans toward knowing.

On American Literature, the largest skill category is understanding and interpreting passages, at 35 to 40 percent. Straight knowledge of works, authors, characters and plots is only 25 to 30 percent. You will be handed poems and prose excerpts you have never seen and asked what they mean.

On English Literature, College Board splits the exam into "ability to" (60 to 65 percent) and "knowledge of" (35 to 40 percent), and that knowledge bucket is heavier and more specific than American Literature's. It explicitly includes identification of authors and metrical patterns. The official sample questions do exactly what that implies: one hands you an unattributed line and asks who wrote it (Keats), another asks you to place five works in chronological order.

This is the practical test of which exam you should sit. Can you see a line of English verse cold and name the poet? Can you sort Chaucer, Donne, Pope, Wordsworth and Yeats into the right order without thinking hard? If yes, English Literature is comfortably worth 6 credits to you. If that question makes you wince, understand that 35 to 40 percent of the paper is knowledge you either have or you do not, and no amount of test technique closes that gap in a fortnight.

The poetry problem

One more structural difference, and it catches people out. Poetry is 45 percent of CLEP English Literature. That is more than novels, short stories and nonfiction combined, and more than twice the drama weight.

If verse is the thing you skim, you are skimming nearly half the exam. And you would not know it from College Board's PDFs: the genre breakdown appears only on the live exam page, not in either downloadable fact sheet. A student preparing from the PDF would never learn that poetry is 45 percent of the test.

American Literature does not publish a genre split at all. It weights by period instead, and the thing to know there is that the Contemporary period (1945 to present) is the largest section at 25 percent, while the colonial material that opens every anthology is the smallest at 15 percent. Most people revise that exam exactly backwards.

Why American Literature is the hardest CLEP exam there is

The pass rates are worth staring at. In the FY2024 DANTES results, American Literature passed 27 percent of military test takers, tied with Chemistry for the lowest of the 28 CLEP exams with published figures. English Literature passed 40 percent. Analyzing and Interpreting Literature passed 69 percent.

Standard caveats, and they are real ones: College Board publishes no pass rate for any CLEP exam. DANTES data comes from the Department of Defense and covers military test takers only, who are not a random sample of everyone sitting CLEP. Use these numbers to rank exams against each other, which is what they are good for, since every exam in the table faces the same population. Do not read them as your personal odds.

Why would American Literature, of all things, sit at the bottom of the entire program? Our reading is that it is not the material, it is the preparation. The exam has quietly become a modern-literature reading test, but a lot of the study material still describes a 19th-century memorization test, including a 2015 College Board fact sheet that is still live and still indexed, which claims the Contemporary period is the smallest section and that knowledge of works is 45 to 60 percent of the exam. Both statements are false about the current exam. Students prepare diligently for the wrong test. We go through this in detail in is the CLEP American Literature exam hard.

The exam neither of these is, and why it might be the right answer

There is a third CLEP literature exam, and for a large share of people asking "American or English?" it is the correct answer to a question they did not ask.

CLEP Analyzing and Interpreting Literature is worth 3 credits, the same as American Literature, at the same $97. But it works completely differently: every passage is printed on the exam. College Board says outright that it "does not require familiarity with specific works" and that "a specific knowledge of historical context (authors and movements) is not required." There is no reading list, no authors to place, no dates. It draws roughly evenly on British and American writing, gives you about 74 seconds per question rather than 54, and passed 69 percent of the same military cohort.

So if your requirement is "a literature course, any literature course," the honest advice is: do not agonize over American versus English. Take the one with nothing to memorize and the best pass rate in the family.

Choose American or English Literature when you have a specific reason to. A degree plan that names the American credit. A British literature background you want to convert into 6 credits. Those are good reasons. "It sounded easier" is not one, and the pass rates show what happens to people who pick that way.

How to prepare for whichever you pick

Both exams reward the same habit: answering questions on unfamiliar passages, under time. Neither rewards rereading a summary.

For English Literature, weight roughly half your practice toward poetry, since that is half the exam, and drill attribution specifically, because this is the one literature CLEP that asks who wrote a line. If your anthology is a 900-page brick, it helps to turn the period introductions into a slide deck you can actually review in a sitting rather than trying to reread the whole thing.

For American Literature, start your revision at 1910 and work forward, because Modernist plus Contemporary is 45 percent of the paper, and spend an afternoon on critical terms and verse forms, which are 15 to 20 percent and finite.

For both, upload your own anthology chapters and lecture notes and generate CLEP-style practice questions from them, then answer at the real pace: 57 seconds per question for English Literature, 54 for American. Speed on unfamiliar text is the thing being tested, and it is the one thing you can only build by doing it.

Credit recommendations are from the ACE National Guide (CLEP-0010 and CLEP-0016) and College Board's live exam pages as of July 2026. Pass rates are FY2024 DANTES figures covering military test takers only. Confirm credit amounts with your own college, which sets its own CLEP award policy. Our CLEP pass rates guide has the full table.