Taking the Test
What was it like when you actually took the test?
Before going in to take the test I knew I was going to pass
math, so I did slack a little bit on it.
I knew the reading. I felt good
with reading. I felt good with
everything besides the writing, the essay.
On the science and the history I had a little wondering, like those
might be my rough ones right there. It
turned out very differently when I actually took the test.
When I went in for the test they gave us a quick rundown on
the booklets and passed them out. I
started with the essay first, the writing essay. That was the thing I was worried about the
most. Everybody got a different
topic. They happened to give me the
topic about making a life change: “What life change could you make that would
affect you in the long run and would affect you down the line in your
life?” If you didn’t have something to
write about you could just make something up, but I picked cigarettes, and
bam! I just wrote a whole page essay.
They wanted at least a page. I gave them
a good solid, first paragraph, where I brought together all the ideas about why
it would be good to quit cigarettes. Then
I just gave three good detail paragraphs about how quitting cigarettes would
affect my life: I would breathe better, smell better, and have more money in my
pocket. Three real quick things, bam! I wrote about all those and then summed it up at
the end. It was a little bit more than a
page long and I passed the thing with a 4 out of 5. I barely even tried and thought, “Damn, that
was easy.” That surprised me because
that was what I was worried about.
Once I did that I had to do the reading section. The reading was a breeze. Everything that you read on the test answers
the questions after the passage. Every
single answer is in there. I got almost
a 90% on the reading, because a couple of times I went real quick and didn’t
really answer. If you fail the reading
then you probably can’t read that great.
[Laughs] If you can read, then
you should be able to do the reading.
There’s no doubt in my mind.
After I finished the reading test, I did the English grammar
section and then was done for the first day.
The second day of the test was supposed to happen a week later, but
something happened so the second test was delayed an extra week. That time it was math, history, and
science. I did really well in science
and history. History was kind of a close
call. I had to guess on some
answers. Time was running out and it was
either get it wrong, or read it as fast as I can and try to get it as close as
I could.
On the history and science tests I found that you don’t need
to know every single thing about it. In
the test they help you. They give you a
little passage and then you look at it and the answers are there, pretty much. The science was a little tough. I did better with the science, actually, than
with the history. But as with the history,
they gave you the information. For
example, they had a map of different turfs and then they have five questions
about the different turfs. It was like a
graph almost. It wasn’t just the kinds
of turfs, they had time periods too. It
was weird. They had questions about
whether the turf was the same from these certain years. I had never seen something like it before,
but if you have any sense and you look at that graph, the answers are
there. You just have to do the littlest
things to find it. As for GED, I don’t
know anybody that couldn’t pass. I
couldn’t imagine not being able to pass the GED. A lot of the answers are right there for you. You just have to use your mind to grasp the
answers.
For the science test they had some questions about
evolution, food-chains and food-webs.
The questions were like, “If you took this away, how would that affect
this other animal?” There were other
questions about molecules and atoms. I
got a few of them right because I remembered some stuff from school. They threw in a couple of different
studies. They didn’t just have one kind
of science for the whole thing.
They don’t make it totally like you have to figure it out
yourself. There’s information there that
you can find the answer through. For
some of the questions you kind of have to know before you take the test, but to
pass it you don’t need to know it. You
just need to know common sense. You
literally need common sense and you can pass the GED. I’m
positive. If you have common sense, you can pass because it’s the way they set
it up. There are things you aren’t going
to know, but you’ve got to just work at it and try your best at those. For the rest of it just put your brain to work
and use the common sense. They give you
little hints, the answers are there. I
didn’t even think it was going to be like that.
Are you saying that the GED questions are less about
memorized information, and more about interpreting problems?
One example is the vocabulary part with the reading section
of the test. It wasn’t necessary to know
how to spell, necessarily. They give you
words, and some of these words, I have no idea what they are. You have to think
to yourself, “How am I going to know what this word means? Well let’s see. Let me use some of my common sense.” So you read this sentence and then you can
kind of figure it out. Just by reading
the sentence with that word in it, you can tell what it’s about. That’s how I figured out how to get a lot of
them right. I did really well on that, just
by looking into the rest of the words around this word they used. This worked even when the word was weird sometimes.
I could probably have my little sister go into that GED
right now, and I swear she could pass it.
My sister is 11-years-old, and I swear she could pass it. I’m pretty positive. The only problem she would have would be with
the math. With the information they give
you on the GED any regular person should have no problem at least getting low passing
grades, even in the 60-65% area the whole time.
There’s no way you should be failing any of this, unless you were
literally not looking at it and ignoring what is in front of you.
Did you take the GED as well? Tell us all about it!
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