ASSET Test Sections

Basics skills test

Writing Skills Test

The ASSET Writing Skills Test consists of 36muiltipe choice questions to be completed within the time frame of 25-minutes The test is helpful to evaluate the student's understanding of the principles of standard written English in punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, strategy, organization, and style. The test does not aim at testing the student on spelling, vocabulary, and rote recall of rules of grammar.

There are about 3 sections of prose passages followed by a series of 12 multiple-choice questions. The student has to face a variety of rhetorical situations trough the employment of a range of passage types. The sections that deal in assessing the student’s skill in usage and mechanics offer alternative responses, including "NO CHANGE," to underlined portions of the text. This is done to test the student ability to decide the correct option that employs the usual practice in usage and mechanics that is acceptable to the sense of the context. The questions used to assess rhetorical skills may refer to an underlined portion of the text or may ask about a section of the passage or the passage as a whole. The student has to decide the option that is most appropriate to the given situation.

The Writing Skills Test covers the following test areas

• Punctuation. Tests such conventions as the use and placement of commas, colons, semicolons, dashes, parentheses, apostrophes, question marks, and exclamation points.
• Grammar. Tests adjectives and adverbs, conjunctions, and agreement between subject and verb and between pronouns and their antecedents.
• Sentence Structure. Tests relationships between/among clauses, placement of modifiers, and shifts in construction.
• Organization. Tests the organization of ideas and the relevance of statements in context (order, coherence, unity).
• Strategy. Tests the appropriateness of expression in relation to audience and purpose, the strengthening of writing with appropriate supporting material, and the effective choice of statements of theme and purpose.
• Style. Tests precision and appropriateness in the choice of words and images, rhetorically effective management of sentence elements, avoidance of ambiguous pronoun references, and economy in writing.

Reading Skills Test

The ASSET Reading Skills Test has a total of 24 multiple-choice questions to be answered within 25-minutes. The test helps to measure the student’s skill in reading comprehension and his ability in referring and reasoning. The questions are formatted to make the student answer them at2 levels. The first deals with the students ability to answer based on referring to what has been clearly stated in the passage and determining the meaning of words through context and the second through reasoning to determine the implied meanings and to draw conclusions, comparisons, and generalizations.

There are three prose passages on the whole, each consisting of 375 words and are identical to the level and kinds of writing commonly used in college freshman curricula. The topics of the passage include prose fiction, business, and the social and are accompanied by a set of eight multiple-choice for each question.

Numerical Skills Test

The ASSET Numerical Skills consists of 32 multiple-choice items to be completed within the assigned 25-minutes. The test is designed to assess the student’s basic numerical skills while dealing with the operations of whole numbers, decimals, and fractions and basic word problem solving skills involving arithmetic.

The elements of the numeric sills test are listed below:

• Arithmetic. The items in this category may include operations with whole numbers; decimals and fractions; factors and common factors; multiples and common multiples; comparison of fractions and decimals; ratio, proportion, and percent; conversion of fractions, decimals, and percents; and order of operations for real numbers.
• Pre-Algebra. The items in this category may include prime and composite numbers, complex fractions, signed numbers, absolute values, scientific notation, and square roots.

Students are not allowed to use calculators on the ASSET Numerical Skills Test.

Advanced Mathematics Measures:

Advanced Mathematics Test: Elementary Algebra

The Elementary Algebra helps to evaluate the student’s knowledge of fundamental algebra. The students do not require any advance knowledge other than that which they acquired in their first high school year. The content areas tested include:

• evaluation of algebraic expressions
• simplification of algebraic expressions
• solution of quadratic equations
• operations with polynomials
• integer exponents
• rational expressions
• solution of linear equations

Advanced Mathematics Test: Intermediate Algebra

The Intermediate Algebra Test is intended to evaluate the student’s knowledge of second high school algebra course. The content areas tested include:

• solutions of polynomial equations by factoring
• graphs of linear equations
• operations with radical and rational expressions
• the distance formula
• slope of a line
• solution of linear inequalities
• simplification of radicals

Advanced Mathematics Test: College Algebra

The College Algebra Test is designed to assess skills commonly acquired in a pre-calculus course. The content areas tested include:

• exponential functions
• factorials
• operations with complex numbers
• composition of functions
• inverses of functions
• linear inequalities
• graphs of polynomials

Advanced Mathematics Test: Geometry

The Geometry Test is helpful in evaluating the student’s skills generally acquired in a high school geometry course. The content areas tested include

• triangles
• circles
• lines
• other geometric figures

Students are allowed to use calculators on the ASSET advanced-level mathematics tests.