WHAT DO THE GED TESTS MEASURE?

The Tests of General Educational Development (GED Tests) Consist of five tests which measure achievement in subject areas associated with a high school program of study. The five tests and their relative content emphases are:

1. LANGUAGE ARTS, READING: Literary Text (poetry; prose fiction before 1920, between 1920-1960, and after 1960 (75%); Nonfiction Prose (25%).


2. LANGUAGE ARTS, WRITING PART I: Organization (15%); Sentence Structure (30%); Usage (30%); Mechanics (25%); PART II: Essay (45-minute direct writing exercise).


3. MATHMATICS: Number Operations and Number Sense (25%); Measurement and Geometry (25%); Data Analysis, Statistics, and Probability (25%); Algebra, Functions, and Patterns (25%).


4. SCIENCE: Life Science (45%); Earth and Space Science (20%); Physical Science (Chemistry and Physics) (35%).


5. SOCIAL STUDIES:National History (25%); World History (15%); Economics (20%); Civics and Government (25%); Geography (15%).

INTERPRETING GED TEST RESULTS

Performance on the GED Tests is reported in two ways:

1. Standard Scores & Percentile ranks

Results on each of the five GED Tests are given as "standard scores" ranging from 200 to 800 and "percentile ranks" ranging from 1 to 99; higher scores result from correctly answering more test questions. Both scores compare the candidates results to those for a recent representative national sample of high school seniors.