What Skills Does the GED Test?

There are many reasons why a person might seek an alternative to a high school diploma. In the United States, you can take the GED, or General Educational Development test, and receive a Certificate of General Educational Development, which is equivalent to a high school diploma. You must score a minimum of 410 out of a possible 800 points on each of the five sub-tests of the GED test.

Language Arts, Writing: Part I

Part one of the writing section includes 50 questions and you are given 75 minutes. You will read workplace, how-to and informational documents and be expected to apply skills including paragraph organization, sentence structure, usage and mechanics. You must restructure paragraphs and sometimes ideas within the paragraph to create more coherent prose. You must also identify and correct sentence fragments and run-on sentences, as well as misplaced modifiers and punctuation to create a parallel structure within the paragraph. You will be expected to identify and correct subject-verb agreement and verb tense and pronoun usage. You will also need to identify and correct errors in punctuation, spelling and capitalization.

Language Arts, Writing: Part II

The second part of the writing section of the GED consists of one essay and you will be given 45 minutes to plan, write and proofread your essay. To pass the essay portion, you must write a clearly organized essay in which you develop ideas. Test takers are also graded on grammar and spelling.

Social Studies

The social studies section includes 50 questions and tests your reading comprehension. You have 70 minutes to read various types of material -- including United States history, Canadian history, civics and government, geography and economics -- and analyze, evaluate and apply the information.

Science

The science portion covers life science, earth science and physical science and you must answer 50 questions in 80 minutes. Aside from being tested on how well you comprehend information given in text, you will also be tested on how well you understand information given in a graph, chart, table, map or figure.

Language Arts, Reading

The reading portion of the test includes 40 questions that test reading comprehension and you are given 65 minutes. You will be expected to comprehend and answer questions on five passages of fiction and five of nonfiction. For the fiction passages, the test taker needs to be familiar with the main types of fiction: poetry, drama and prose. For the non-fiction passages, you should be familiar with nonfiction writing. You will be asked to analyze, apply and make connections from the given information.

Mathematics

The mathematics portion consists of 50 questions and you are given 90 minutes. There are two sections, each with 25 questions. You can use a calculator, which is given at the testing center, for the first 25 questions. You will be expected to have a basic sense of using whole numbers, decimals, fractions, ratios and roots. You will be tested on measurement, geometry and algebra, as well as your ability to analyze data, statistics and probability.

References

• American Council on Education: GED Testing Service