Update May 8, 2016: I learned the exam was taken down, updated and back up in 2016. So your experience might be much different than mine was back in 2012.
Several people claim the Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union DSST is the hardest exam they’ve taken. I went through everyone’s post in the specific exam feedback section on DegreeForum and most people were in agreement that it was difficult.
So my score surprised me—72! I’ve only scored in the 70s one other time and that was on the Introductory Psychology CLEP because it was the first exam I ever took so I studied for it like crazy, afraid that I might fail.
I’m not sure what to attribute my high score to. I thought maybe it has to do with me liking history, but I didn’t score so high on the six other history exams I passed.
All I used to pass was my bread and butter, the two best study resources for credit-by-exam test-takers ever: Instant Cert and the DegreeForum. I went through the cards exactly six times, reading them but not filling in the blanks. Then I checked the forum and looked up just about every event, person, and thing I didn’t know.
One poster mentioned Svetlana Alliluyeva, the youngest child and only daughter of Joseph Stalin. She defected to America and died in Wisconsin not too long ago: November 2011. Pretty interesting. And I’m surprised I’d never heard of her. Anyways, she showed up on my test and I got the question right. A good example of how much of an advantage it is to use the forum.
It could be that I just got lucky, that my version of the test matched up with everything I’d studied, because I knew most of the questions and finished the test so fast I couldn’t believe it.
The hardest part of studying was keeping track of Russian names. Who is who and who came first. Make sure you know the leaders in chronological order. A lot of questions were asked of me on Gorbachev. And a lot of questions were of the “which of the following” type.
There are some related videos to watch on YouTube, like The Russian Revolution in Color. Not the best use of study time, but entertaining and productive. With the same amount of time it takes to watch it, you could go through the IC cards twice, a much bigger bang for your time. But I can understand why some find the cards tedious. I was on a time constraint to pass this one, one of the last few to complete my degree!
Good luck!
Brad says
When did you take the exam? It had been removed for all of 2015, and only reinstated January 1, 2016.
Sean says
Hey Brad, I took it late 2012. Thank you for letting me know. I’ll make a note of it in the post.