CPT Skills

Skills Measured by the CPT and FCELPT Assessments

Reading Comprehension

• Recognize the main idea and less central ideas
• Recognize the tone of the passage
• Recognize relationships between sentences, such as the use of one sentence to illustrate another
• Answer questions that require synthesis of information, including gauging point of view and
• intended audience
• Recognize organizing principles in a paragraph or passage
• Identify contradictory or contrasting statements
• Extract points that are merely implied
• Follow moderately complex arguments or speculations
• Analyze the logic employed by the author in making an argument

Sentence Skills

• Correct sentence fragments
• Solve problems of faulty coordination and subordination in a sentence with one or two clauses
• Manipulate complex verb tenses
• Correct misplaced modifiers
• Solve problems that combine grammar and logic
• Manipulate complex sentences with two or more subordinate clauses
• Correct problems of syntax and repetitive diction
• Recognize correct and incorrect linkages of clauses, including problems involving semicolons

Elementary Algebra

• Demonstrate a sense of order relationships and the relative size of signed numbers
• Demonstrate the ability to multiply a whole number by a binomial
• Combine like terms
• Multiply binomials
• Evaluate algebraic expressions
• Add radicals
• Add algebraic fractions
• Factor quadratic expressions in the form ax2 + bx + c, where a =
• Factor the difference of squares
• Square binomials
• Solve linear equations with integer coefficients
• Simplify algebraic expressions
• Factor quadratic expressions where a = 1
• Solve quadratic equations
• Solve linear equations with fractional and literal coefficients and linear inequalities with integer coefficients
• Solve systems of equations
• Identify graphical properties of equations and inequalities