Word: ged
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...thought it was a metropolitan megacampus, or any campus at all, better guess again. By the sheer number of credentials granted, it's the American Council on Education, a Washington-based lobbying group that moonlights as the proprietor of the General Education Development, or GED, Testing Service. In 2004 alone, the Council granted over 400,000 GED certificates to people of all ages, most of them high school dropouts...
...years after it was created as a way for returning veterans to get quick high school degrees and take advantage of the GI Bill, concerns are mounting that the GED may be hurting the education system more than helping...
...GED is not a simple exam. It's a battery of five tests - reading, writing, science, social studies and math - that stretch out over 7.5 hours. It's taxing enough that Lyn Schaefer, the GED Testing Service's Director of Test Development, says that despite the test takers' 70% pass rate, six out of 10 enrolled high school seniors who do trial runs of the exam wouldn't be able to pass the real thing. Granted, the real test-takers have weeks or months of test prep for the GED that trial test-takers lack, but higher education has noted...
...even if the GED is academically equivalent to a high school diploma, researchers say it functions too often as a siren call for restless teenagers, just attractive enough to lure them out of high school, but not so alluring that they actually end up taking it and go on to college. Once a test designed solely for adults, the GED is increasingly becoming a teenager's test. A growing number of states have dropped the minimum age for taking the test from 18 to 16, and 42% of all test-takers were teenagers in 2004, compared with...
...cases where students do get the certificate, a rash of studies over the last decade have found that life outcomes for GED holders are similar to that of dropouts themselves. "The GED is not a substitute for a high school," says Mary Reimer of the National Dropout Prevention Center. "And most employers would tell you that too. They would pass up a GED holder for a high school graduate any day." The Department of Defense has come to the same conclusion. Their studies show that half of all alternative credential holders, typically GED holders or correspondence course graduates, quit...