GED Test

The General Educational Development (GED) test is designed to identify students who have acquired high school-level knowledge and skills outside of a typical classroom environment. Most jurisdictions in the United States and Canada treat a passing score on the GED the same as a high school diploma. For this reason, the test is popular among immigrants, home-schooled students, and students who left high school without earning a degree.

The GED has five components, covering the following content areas: Writing, Social Studies, Reading, and Mathematics. In order to pass the test, a student needs to demonstrate proficiency in these areas equal to or greater than that of an average high school senior. In the writing section, the student will be asked to write an essay on an assigned topic and answer 50 multiple-choice questions on punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure. Students are given 125 minutes to complete these tasks. The Social Studies section is composed of 50 multiple-choice questions, which must be answered within 70 minutes. These questions cover the following topics: civics, economics, geography, history, and government. The Science section consists of 50 multiple-choice questions, which must be completed within 80 minutes. The topics covered in this section are Earth science, life science, space science, and physical science. The Reading section consists of 40 questions and must be completed within 65 minutes. In this section, the student is required to answer multiple-choice questions about five fiction passages and two nonfiction passages. Finally, the Mathematics section is composed of 50 questions, which must be answered within 90 minutes. Ten of these questions require the student to write out his or her work; the rest are in a multiple-choice format. The Mathematics section includes questions on the following topics: number operations, geometry, measurement, data analysis, statistics, probability, algebra, and calculus.