CLEP® practice test

Free CLEP Principles of Management Practice Test (2026)

This is a set of 25 original practice questions that follow the official CLEP Principles of Management content outline and its topic weights, each with a short explanation.

  • 25 questions
  • 4 topics from the official outline
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The practice test

25 questions

Question 1 of 25A sales representative gets orders from both the regional sales manager and the head of marketing, and the two sets of orders often conflict. Which of Henri Fayol's principles of management is being broken?
Question 2 of 25A company raises its pay to the industry average and renovates its break rooms. Complaints drop sharply, but employees do not work any harder. In Herzberg's two-factor theory, what kind of factors did the company improve?
Question 3 of 25A small project has five activities. Design (3 days) must come before Build (4 days). Order parts (5 days) must come before Inspect parts (1 day). Assembly (2 days) can start only after both Build and Inspect parts are finished. Design and Order parts can both start on the first day. What is the shortest time in which the whole project can be finished?
Question 4 of 25A manager needs a new cleaning service. She calls companies one at a time and signs with the first one that meets her minimum standards for price and reliability, without checking the rest. What does this illustrate?
Question 5 of 25Three countries remove tariffs on goods traded among themselves, but each keeps its own separate tariffs on goods from outside countries. What kind of agreement is this?
Question 6 of 25A manager believes that most employees dislike work, avoid responsibility, and must be closely watched and threatened with punishment to get results. Which view does this manager hold?
Question 7 of 25A supervisor uses the full range of the rating scale for most of his staff. But he rates his best salesperson at the top on every dimension of her review, including punctuality and paperwork, where her record is only average. Which rating error is this?
Question 8 of 25Before accepting each delivery, a restaurant's chef checks the fish for freshness and temperature and sends back any that fail. What type of control is this?
Question 9 of 25A store sells 2,000 units of a product per year. Each order costs $50 to place, and holding one unit in inventory for a year costs $5. Using the economic order quantity formula EOQ = √(2DS/H), how many units should the store order at a time?
Question 10 of 25A new project team has met a few times. Members now argue over roles and whose ideas to follow, and some openly challenge the team leader. In Tuckman's model of group development, which stage is the team in?
Question 11 of 25A company's hiring test gives nearly the same scores when the same applicants take it twice, but those scores have no relationship to how well people later perform on the job. How should the test be described?
Question 12 of 25A manager moves from a country where employees openly question their bosses to one where employees rarely disagree with superiors and expect bosses to make decisions without consulting them. Which of Hofstede's cultural dimensions best describes this difference?
Question 13 of 25A city government tells every department to build next year's budget from scratch, justifying each expense as if the department were brand new, instead of adjusting last year's figures. What is this approach called?
Question 14 of 25A company removes two layers of middle management. Each remaining manager now supervises 15 people instead of 6. How has the organization's structure changed?
Question 15 of 25A bottling line's control chart has stayed within its limits for months. On the day a new operator starts, one sample's average fill falls far above the upper control limit. What should the manager conclude?
Question 16 of 25A physical-ability test for warehouse jobs selects 60% of the men who take it but only 30% of the women. Using the four-fifths (80%) rule of thumb that is commonly used to screen hiring tests for discrimination, what does this result suggest?
Question 17 of 25In the Hawthorne studies at Western Electric in the 1920s and 1930s, researchers found that output in a test group rose even when its lighting was reduced. What did this suggest?
Question 18 of 25An American appliance maker and a Vietnamese manufacturer form a new company in Vietnam that they each own half of, sharing its costs, profits and control. Which way of entering a foreign market is this?
Question 19 of 25Under Fiedler's contingency model, a task-oriented manager turns out to be a poor match for her department's situation. What does Fiedler's model recommend?
Question 20 of 25Two department heads disagree about how to spend a shared budget. After long talks, they design a plan that fully meets both of their goals. In the Thomas-Kilmann model, which conflict-handling style did they use?
Question 21 of 25In the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) matrix, how is a product classified if it has the largest share of a market that grows only about 1% a year?
Question 22 of 25A data-entry clerk is given the authority to plan her own schedule, check the quality of her own work, and deal directly with clients. Which job design approach is this?
Question 23 of 25Before introducing a new scheduling system, a hospital's managers share data showing how many errors the old system caused and hold meetings to explain why change is needed. In Kurt Lewin's change model, which stage is this?
Question 24 of 25A company could legally sell a product with labeling that customers are likely to misread, but it decides not to because doing so would mislead them. In Carroll's pyramid of corporate social responsibility, which responsibility is the company meeting?
Question 25 of 25A manager must tell a long-serving employee that the employee's job is being eliminated. According to media richness theory, which channel is best?

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