History

The American GED exam was developed by the American Council on education in 1942. It was originally designed for people did not graduate from high school in the USA and was intended to demonstrate skills equivalent to having done so. Its purpose was to provide veterans whose education was disrupted by the war with the qualifications necessary to progress into higher education.

Nowadays the GED exam is used by about 98% of universities in America as a general aptitude test to assess whether a student is capable of undertaking a degree. The GED exam is also commonly used by universities outside of America as a means of testing students who wish to study on their international programs, for example in Thailand top tier universities like Chulalongkorn and Mahidol require students to have passed their GED.

The GED test has to be taken in person (as opposed to online) at an approved testing center. The current version of the GED was created in 2002 and includes 5 subject areas; Language Arts: GED Reading, Language Arts: GED Writing (which is 2 parts), GED Maths, GED Science and GED Social Studies. The scores for each GED exam can range from a minimum of 200 points to a maximum of 800 points. If a student passes with close to 800 it demonstrates the student to be in the top 1% of graduating high school seniors. However, to pass the GED exam a score of 410 in required for each individual exam but in order to pass the whole GED an average of 450 is required across all 5 tests this is equivalent to a cumulative score of 2250.

It is necessary to thoroughly prepare for the GED exam as the exams are designed to measure the knowledge equivalent to that of a graduating American high school student.

Language Arts, Reading

The Language Arts: GED Reading exam is comprised of 40 multiple choice questions. Each question requires students to select answers based on a range of English passages that are between 200-400 words long. The passages that are given are drawn from various writing styles including; drama, poetry, non-fiction, workplace documents, prose fiction or critical reviews.

There are 4 types of questions on the Language Arts: GED Reading exam; Comprehension questions, Application questions, Analysis questions and Synthesis questions.

Comprehension questions (20% of exam)

This is designed to test a student’s understanding of a passage given to them. There are 4 question types:

Application questions (15 percent) test your ability to understand and use information or concepts from the passage in a different situation.

Comprehension questions (20 percent) check your understanding of a part, or all of the passage.

Synthesis questions (30 percent to 35 percent) measure your ability to join information together to form a whole. Synthesis questions can be integrating information from a single part of the passage, or various parts.

Analysis questions (30 percent to 35 percent) usually focus on a particular part of the passage and test your skill in evaluating the information.

Language Arts, Writing

The two sections of the Language Arts: GED Writing exam the first contains of 50 multiple choice questions to be completed within a 75 minute time period. Students are required to revise and edit documents of between 200-300 words long.

This section contains 3 kinds of questions:

Construction shift questions (20%)

These questions require you to change the sentence structure of a number of sentences. However, there are no mistakes in the original text so it is an exercise in improvement. The will also be questions in that require GED students to re-organize a passage.

Revision questions (35%)

These questions require you to fix just one part of a sentence. There are five choices and the first is to make no changes to the original sentence. This is because some questions do not contain any mistakes.

Correction questions (45% of the score)

These questions give you five opportunities to correct anything from one sentence to the entire text.

The second part of the GED Writing exam is a full essay question. Students must write about an opinion or give an explanation on a subject provided. This section must be completed in 45 minutes and the essay cannot exceed the two pages provided. Details of some of the areas that should be address in the essay are given below.

Response to prompt

Students to should discuss only the subject provided.

Development and details

Students should illustrate their argument with relevant examples with specific details.

Organization

The paragraphs of the essay should be well organized and contain an introduction, body of the essay and conclusion.

Conventions of American edited English

You must write with a good use of English that can be easily followed and understood. Correct grammar and sentence structure are examples of this.

The most important thing to remember is to write an essay that has a clear focus, contains plenty of illustrative example and provides details of the points being made.

The most important thing is to write an organized essay with a clear focus, examples and details. Making a few grammatical mistakes is not a problem provided the arguments of the essay are clearly put forward.