Study Guide for the GED in English

Preparing for the GED can open a world of possibilities.

The General Education Development test, or GED, is designed to open a whole new world of possibilities for youth and adults alike. According to, Michael Ormsby, president of The GED Academy, people who earn a GED credential make an average of $385,000 more over the course of a lifetime than people who did not complete their education. Part of the GED exam involves an English and writing test, and studying can be the key to opening up a door of opportunity for your life.

GED Information

The GED credential is available to people who did not complete their high school diplomas. In most states, any adult who did not complete high school is eligible to take the exam. For younger students who have dropped out of high school, an official notice of dropout or dismissal is generally required to qualify to take the exam.

Most employers will accept a GED credential as the equivalent of a high school diploma. This includes the U.S. military and many trade or sales positions. According to Ormsby, 97 percent of America's colleges accept the GED credential as a replacement for a high school diploma.

Part I

The portion of the GED exam dedicated to language arts or English is broken into two parts that test different skills in different ways.

The first part of the language arts GED exam consists of 50 multiple-choice questions; test takers have 75 minutes to complete all of the questions. These questions focus on revising and editing text for proper English usage.The multiple-choice questions judge a test taker's ability to edit text based on a number of English technical rules. The test will provide a selection of text from a number of documents, such as instructions, directions, letters and articles. Test takers read those selections and answer questions regarding the organization, sentence structure, word usage and grammatical mechanics of the text.

Organization comprises 15 percent of the questions. Types of questions include finding topic sentences or restructuring paragraphs to provide a more logical order. Mechanics makes up 25 percent of the test and focuses on capitalization and punctuation. Sentence structure and usage questions each make up 30 percent of the exam. Sentence structure relates to fragments, run-ons, comma errors and parallelism. Usage involves studying subject-verb agreement, tenses and pronouns.

Part II

Part two of the language arts exam is an essay that test takers have 45 minutes to complete.

Test takers receive an essay prompt and are asked to write their opinions of or explain the topic. The prompts will involve general-knowledge subjects (such as censorship or fast food) that do not require statistical or in-depth knowledge. Instead, test takers should rely on their own experiences to back up their responses to the prompts.

This section is graded on a scale of one to four, with four being the highest grade possible. There are five major areas that the graders use to evaluate the essay: how well the essay focuses on the presented topic, the organization of information, expanded understanding through details, proper use of conventions of the English language (including grammar, mechanics and usage) and word choice.

Scoring

The essays from the second part of the GED are read by two different graders, who give the essay a grade based on their overall impressions. The two scores are averaged together. If the essay receives an average score lower than a two, the test taker will be required to take both sections again.

If the average essay score results in a two or higher, that score is combined with the overall score from the multiple choice in part one to give a composite score for the English GED exam. The grades are compared with traditional high school graduates to determine how successful a tester was on the exam.

Preparation Tips

Practice makes perfect in many things, including English usage. Read as much as possible in the weeks leading up to the exams: news stories, magazines, books and other text sources provide valuable exposure to different types of usage and organization. Learn to recognize what sounds right and wrong, and study different sentence structure from different types of writing to gain a better understanding of what to expect. Expose yourself to multiple types of writing, because the selections given in part one of the exam will provide a number of different types as well.

Practice writing as much as you can about anything you can think of. If you read a newspaper article about a topic that excites you, record your thoughts. Pay attention to how you structure your thoughts on paper; don't be afraid to go back and rewrite your work in a clearer or more organized fashion. Have someone else read your writing to help you find potential grammar, spelling or structure mistakes.

When you get to the actual test, it is important to take your time on each question. Read each selection in part one multiple times and underline key phrases or areas that you think may contain an error. Consult the selection after each question to help you come up with the best answer. Read the prompt in part two multiple times, underline key phrases that can help you come up with an answer and restate the prompt in your own words to help you structure your thoughts.

References

• Study Guide Zone: GED Testing
• Purdue University: GED Study Guide
• Famous People with a GED

Resources

• The GED Academy