Dr. Martin Hash Podcast

In 1942, U.S. armed forces developed a General Educational Development test, or GED, to measure the acceptability of recruits who had not completed high school. Since then it has been adopted worldwide as a high school diploma equivalency exam. A candidate must be 17 years of age and a resident of the state. It consists of 4 parts that can be passed separately: language arts, mathematics, science & social studies. For each part, the score varies from 100 to 200, with 200 meaning the student is in the top 1% of high school seniors. It takes an average score of 580 out of 800 to pass, and it’s difficult. In fact, very year actual graduates are sample tested, of which 30% fail. The GED was last updated in 2014. The idea of the GED foreshadows self-paced online learning, especially since it also shows the weakness of a traditional classroom-taught diploma, a large number who graduated simply haven’t achieved a minimum level of knowledge. Schools should offer the GED to all their students, regardless of age, to see which can move on to higher levels of education; and a GED-equivalent should be created for some degrees, similar to testing for certification. How the current university paradigm has persisted so long even with the GED as a precedence must be social & political because it certainly isn’t logical.