The number of Rhode Islanders taking the GED plummeted in 2002, the first year
of a new test series, with only 1,139 people completing the five-test battery
– a 66 percent drop from 2001, according to a new report from the General Educational
Development Testing Service.
GED test-taking dropped across the United States and Canada as well, but less dramatically: by 43.6 percent from 2001, 48 percent when counting only those who completed the battery. The year before the new test, 2001, had marked a major spike in testing, however, with a record 979,829 people completing the five tests, so a sizable drop had been expected.
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That said, it was the single-biggest one-year drop since at least 1974, GED Testing Service figures show, and a far more dramatic drop than the last two times the test was changed, in 1978 and 1988. Given the importance of the GED for millions of Americans hoping to get better-than-menial jobs or enter college – in Rhode Island, more than 140,000 adults lack a high school-level diploma – it’s a substantial setback.
Joan Chikos Auchter, executive director of the GED, acknowledged in an announcement of the 2002 figures that the drop had been major, but she noted that this time around, the GED tests had undergone “unprecedented changes.”
More than before, the GED Testing Service and local officials reached out to their target populations to alert them to the change and rush them to complete the battery of tests if they had already started, because they wouldn’t be able to apply tests from the old series toward the new GED. A change in the scoring system also delayed implementation at many sites, Auchter said, further reducing the 2002 numbers.
National figures for 2003 are not yet available, but in Rhode Island, Robert Mason, who just stepped down as head of adult education for the state to go work for the GED’s parent, the American Council on Education, said the numbers here seemed to be slowly bouncing back. A total of 2,420 Rhode Islanders took some part of the GED in 2002, Mason said, and in 2003, he expects the total to be about 3,000. In each of the last two years before the switch, the number had exceeded 4,000.
Part of the reason for the drop, all agree, is that many prospective GED test-takers were at least initially afraid the new test would be harder. There was plenty to fuel that concern: The new tests reflect “an increased emphasis on academic standards,” the GED Web site says, and the math test now includes more charts and graphs and the use of a calculator. Moreover, the passing score was raised to match what 60 percent of graduating high school seniors could pass, down from 63 percent under a standard set in 1997.
In Rhode Island, Mason said, there was a lot of “angst and hype and scurrying around” that led people to take the test in 2001 and avoid it in 2002. Nationwide, Auchter said in the GED report, less-confident students seemed to wait and see how others would do, and in fact, the first few months, the pass rate was unusually high. The trend “dramatically slowed” as 2002 progressed, however, ending up at a 70.6 percent passing rate nationwide, compared with 69.8 percent in 2001.
In Rhode Island, the pass rate in the first year of the new test was 68.4 percent, down from 72.5 percent in 2001.
So is the new GED really harder, and will fewer people be able to successfully take the tests in the future? Auchter’s answer is: “It is too soon to tell.” At local testing and GED preparation centers, meanwhile, opinions vary.
At the Community College of Rhode Island’s Lincoln campus, Elaine Scott, staff assistant in the adult education office, said the new test has “moved along pretty well,” especially with younger test-takers – recent high school dropouts who already had it easier under the old system. The math test seems to be a bit harder for some, Scott said, but for the most part, “they’re having no problem with it.”
At Project RIRAL (Rhode Island Regional Adult Learning), an adult-education agency serving eight communities in northern Rhode Island, executive director Patricia Bellart said the test doesn’t seem harder, though it is clearly different and requires a different kind of preparation, and the math test does seem a bit more challenging.
Bellart said Project RIRAL’s clients run the gamut of adult education, from recent dropouts, to older workers, to a large number of immigrants with varying levels of literacy in their own languages, and there’s no question that it’s easier for the dropouts.
“The higher the level you go in high school – if you go through the 10th grade, for example, and actually attend classes and do some of the work and then you drop out – the GED is easier for you to pass,” Bellart said. After all, she noted, the GED tests high school-level academic skills, and if someone has practiced those skills recently, it helps.
For students with long-standing academic difficulties, however, and especially for immigrants struggling to learn English, the GED can be “terrible,” Bellart said. Even before the GED change, the tests involved a lot of reading, she said, and because the test is timed, it could be hard for someone to do well on it.
At Dorcas Place, an adult literacy center in Providence that serves a particularly needy population, president Brenda Dann-Messier said the GED was already a tough goal to achieve for many of the students, and now it’s “much more difficult.”
“Almost every student who comes in here says they want a GED, and last year we had seven who passed the GED,” Dann-Messier said. Most Dorcas Place students would need several years’ worth of remedial work to be able to pass the tests.
“I don’t think the intensions are wrong; I’m very much for school reform and I’m very much for raising the bar,” she added. “But there is a segment of our population who have very low language and literacy skills, and we don’t have the time to spend getting them to a GED. And we can’t deny them access to the work force without it.”
For both Dann-Messier and Bellart, the answer for their particular populations lies elsewhere. Dorcas Place is looking to set up “career academies” to train workers in specific fields, giving them a more narrowly focused instruction that they can complete well before they’d get to a GED.
At Project RIRAL, Bellart is working with Donna Chambers, a veteran of adult education in Rhode Island and other states, to revive an “external diploma” program, a portfolio-based kind of high school equivalency.
