Far from being something for “losers,” the GED is a chance for people to turn their lives around. Staying in the same place, with a low paying job, or no job at all, and low self-esteem is not the answer. The GED is the path to get back on track, and one of the best roads it can lead to is college.

Recently, three students who earned their GEDs at New Mexico State University were profiled in the Cibola Beacon. All three have gone on to succeed in college, on their ways to new careers. Stefanie Grandjean, mother of a seven-year-old daughter, is studying to become a nurse with a graduate degree, as well as teaching math to other students studying for their GEDs.

Arnold Davis also works for the GED program where he studied for his GED. He is studying for a degree in automotive mechanics and is active in student government. His future goals include earning a degree in social work. Sandra Daily, who earned her GED in 2006, already has an AA in general studies and is planning to get a degree in fine arts. Over the course of three months, she went from grade-school level to being ready for college.

The GED is a step forward, toward more confidence, higher education, and better jobs. It is a path toward tearing down those walls built up by voices saying, “You’re stupid.” Just succeeding at the GED goes a long way toward students regaining belief in themselves.

See the Cibola Beacon article here: http://www.cibolabeacon.com/articles/2009/11/05/features/doc4af36314ae42e018756565.txt

Why would a medical doctor go back to earn a high school equivalency diploma? When Adams went to college early in the 1940s, he wasn’t required to graduate high school. He skipped forward again into medical school, at a time when the requirements weren’t as formalized as they are today. In more recent years, Adams has been active in water issues in his community of West Linn, Oregon, and he wanted to earn certification as a water plant operator. That’s when he ran into a problem. The certification requires a high school diploma.

Adams’s problem is similar to the situation many adults today are facing. In the past, many jobs and opportunities were open to those without a high school diploma. In many cases, quitting high school early didn’t seem like a major issue, since it was easy to enter the job market without a diploma. That’s changed. If a person without a high school diploma or GED loses their job, it’s much harder to get a new job now, without a diploma. Promotions, higher education, and changes in career can be closed off, even to a seasoned professional, without a diploma.

The good news is that the GED gives adults the opportunity to catch up with a world that demands a high school diploma. Adams took a GED practice test and discovered that he was ready to earn a GED right away, and many adults will have the same experience. For many others, just a few weeks of brush-up is enough to catch up on high school skills and be ready for the GED. Even for those who left school many years ago or didn’t do well in school, a good study program can provide quick and easy preparation.

A high school diploma is quickly becoming a necessity in today’s world, even for someone like William Adams, with many accomplishments and a long-standing career. For the 39 million American adults with no high school diploma, the GED is the answer, and it’s never too late to start moving forward with a GED diploma.

Graves knew that she’d need to get her high school diploma to move forward with her life. That’s when she found out about the GED. Instead of taking night classes to finish high school, Graves was able to earn her GED diploma. Now, Graves works as an office manager. This year, she spoke at the GED graduation ceremony for local GED graduates, who included her two youngest brothers who earned their GED this year.

Graves hopes to earn a college degree, and keep moving forward in her life. Her story shows the challenges that face American adults who never graduated high school. The GED provides the opportunity to qualify legitimately for the better jobs and higher education that allow adults to care for their families and accomplish their goals in life.

The road to success takes a commitment to get your GED, but passing the GED is an achievable goal. Many people can prepare for the exams with a few weeks of brush-up. Most adults have more of a foundation of high school skills than they think. Learners, even if they’ve been out of school for a while or had trouble in the classroom, can gain the essential skills the GED tests through a good study program. Taking Pam Graves’ example and earning your GED can be a breakthrough decision for the rest of your life.

As the number of adult Americans without a high school degree nears 40 million, adult education is becoming a critical issue in the United States. GED education programs are sponsored by communities, non-profit organizations, and school districts across the country. Teaching undereducated adults is extremely challenging. Most adults who didn’t graduate high school never learned good study habits, never felt motivated to learn and never did well in a traditional classroom environment.

Research shows that most adults with a low level of education are encumbered with poor self-esteem, frustration, feelings of helplessness, and dependency on others. It’s particularly important for adult learners to succeed in their experiences with the GED. Success at this stage shows students that it’s possible to succeed. The GED Academy identifies four crucial factors for success for adult learners.

1. The learner must be able to set the pace.

Adult learners begin their GED preparation at various stages. They have gaps in their education that are difficult to predict and unique for each individual. Students should be able to skip materials they’re familiar with and review new material as many times as needed. Adult education must be customized to students’ needs. Spending hours on material that adults already know destroys motivation, and going too quickly over unknown material leads to frustration.

2. Interest, not content, drives learning.

Students who never succeeded in school don’t find classroom materials inherently interesting. Innovative adult education programs like the GED Academy prep program use storytelling techniques, among others, to capture learners’ interest. The lessons follow a virtual GED classroom, peopled with characters that include a class clown, a single mother, and an ex-convict. Following the story of virtual students’ lives creates interest and motivation, and it helps answer the question: how is this information important to me?

3. The learner needs immediate feedback.

Immediate feedback on adult learners’ progress creates a sense of accomplishment, since students can see their incremental improvement. It also shows students when they need to repeat material. Many adult education students can’t assess their own learning. Immediate feedback helps build self-awareness of the learning process.

4. Success is the great motivator.

Every part of the learning experience is an opportunity for success. Students who have experienced failure and frustration need to recognize each little success along the way. Through a combination of storytelling, humor, exposing the learning processes of fellow students, and providing immediate feedback, learning programs like the GED Academy prep program attempt to build a foundation of success for learners. Whatever methodology you’re using, give students a flexible study plan tailored to their needs, keep them interested, and give them immediate feedback. Really, these are the keys to the fourth element: success. Make sure they see their successes.

Paul Salopek was born in Barstow, California in 1962. He dropped out of high school, and he took the GED to earn his high school equivalency. He didn’t stop there. While working as a fisherman and farm worker, Salopek earned a degree in environmental biology from UC Santa Barbara, graduating in 1984. When his motorcycle broke down in New Mexico a year later, he took a job at a local newspaper to earn money to repair his bike. It was the beginning of a career.

Salopek has worked for National Geographic and Texas’s El Paso Times. Currently he is a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, writing about Africa, Central Asia, and the Balkans. In 1998, he won a Pulitzer Prize for writing about the Human Genome Diversity Project, and in 2001, he won another for his writing about Africa, including the civil war in Congo. He has written about over 50 countries throughout the world. In 2006, Salopek was held in prison for five weeks in Darfur, one of the many conflict zones he’s travelled to as a writer.

Salopek is the recipient of the 2009 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award for courageous journalism. As part of the award, he received an honorary doctor of laws degree from Colby College in Waterville, Maine.

Paul Salopek took his GED and went to the ends of the earth with it. That’s what the GED is for. It opens doors for adults who need more opportunity, for better jobs, higher education, and personal fulfillment. Each GED earned represents the potential for achieving a dream.

The GED Academy guides hundreds of test-takers through the GED program. Learners tell the same stories over and over. The first questions everyone asks are: What can I expect? What will it be like? What do I need to know?

The GED is a sophisticated test that measures the most important skills that people should learn in high school. The test is divided into five sections: mathematics, social studies, science, reading, and writing. Most of the sections are in a multiple choice format, and the writing section includes a timed essay. The questions are formulated to test essential real-life skills: problem solving, critical thinking, evaluation, information processing, and making inferences. The GED is a thinking test. The GED Academy calls it a thinking marathon because the GED takes eight hours of almost non-stop thinking.

The analogy is not a bad one. A person who planned to run a marathon would need to train his or her body, and in much the same way, GED test-takers need to train their minds to think in specific ways. Training for a marathon takes time, and runners spend time building up their muscles and lungs every day. In much the same way, The GED Academy recommends that GED test-takers should set aside some time each day to practice. The amount of time adult learners spend in test preparation depends on their current level of learning.

GED test preparation is for a specific purpose. You’re learning a well-defined set of skills, not facts and figures, but skills, like how to think through a problem to come to the right conclusion. It may take a few weeks or a couple of months, but with the right preparation, adult learners are amazingly successful at the GED.

Just like running a marathon requires specific strategies to go all the way, passing the GED also requires strategies for pacing yourself and test-taking skills as well as specific thinking skills. The emphasis of the GED is on measuring test-takers’ ability to reason, observe, and think clearly… skills that adults can learn using the right tools.

The benefits of the GED are difficult to deny. GED graduates can qualify for better jobs and higher education. With a GED, an adult will on average earn $350,000 more throughout a lifelong career. Adults who go on to higher education earn even more. Ormsby credits this, in part, to the real-life skills that students learn to pass the GED. It’s more than just a paper. The GED represents essential knowledge and understanding.

Take a look at unemployment rates in 2008. No high school diploma? The unemployment rate was 9%. Among high school graduates, it was only 5.7%. That’s lower by more than a third. What if you earned a 2-year Associate degree at a community college? The unemployment rate was only 3.7% among people with Associate degrees. The more education you earned, the lower your chances of being unemployed. That means education equates to jobs.

But what kind of jobs? That’s where income comes in. Among people 25 and over who had full-time jobs, the median weekly income for people without a high school diploma was $426 in 2008. With a high school diploma, it jumped to $591 a week, an increase of nearly 40%. With that 2-year Associate degree, median income $736 a week. More education equates to better paying jobs.

Here is the complete data table from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics:
2008 Unemployment rate    Education attained    2008 Median weekly earnings
2.0%                           Doctoral degree                       $1,555
1.7%                           Professional degree                $1,522
2.4%                          Master’s degree                       $1,228
2.8%                          Bachelor’s degree                    $978
3.7%                          Associate degree                      $736
5.1%                          Some college, no degree          $645
5.7%                          High-school graduate              $591
9.0%                          Less than a HS diploma           $426

The opportunities that education gives you are too good to pass up. If you don’t have your high school diploma, look into the GED. You can get more education, and more education means more opportunity.

Most people think of physical disabilities, when they think of test-taking accommodations. The GED provides accommodations for people with many types of disabilities, though, including physical disabilities, emotional and mental health disabilities, learning disabilities, and ADHD (Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder). The GED testing center can provide extended time, an audiocassette version, a braille test version, a calculator for the second math test, a talking calculator for the entire math test, a private room, supervised frequent breaks, or other accommodations specific to the disability. A qualified professional, such as your doctor, will need to provide documentation of your diagnosis and needs.

One of the most common disabilities is ADHD, or Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. ADHD can often go undiagnosed, and cause people to perform poorly in school. People suffering from ADHD may drop out because school is so difficult when you can’t concentrate, focus, or sit still. To get accommodations for ADHD, you’ll need information from a psychiatrist, medical doctor, or psychologist who specializes in ADHD, along with information about your history and symptoms. You’ll need to take a test of attention, like the TOVA Gordon Diagnostic Battery. The GED test accommodations you can receive (such as frequent breaks or extra time) will be based on your symptoms, and how they’ll limit you during the test.

Accommodations may also be given for learning disabilities, such as dyslexia (reading disabilities), dysgraphia (writing disabilities), or dyscalculia (math disabilities). For these types of disabilities, you’ll also need a diagnosis from a doctor, who will need to report your scores on tests for learning and cognitive disabilities.

Talk to your doctor if you feel you need accommodations. Discuss what tests you may need to take, and whether you need to see a specialist.

Even with accommodations, the GED may be difficult for people with disabilities. Studying can also be a problem. The GED Academy strives to make its program as accessible as possible for students with disabilities. Go to the GED Academy website at http://www.passGED.com to learn more about our program, and how it’s designed to help everyone learn.

For more information and GED test-taking accommodation forms, visit the ACE GED Testing Service website: http://www.acenet.edu/Content/NavigationMenu/ged/test/Take/Accommodations_Disab.htm

The biggest stumbling blocks to earning a GED are usually the same things that stopped potential GED test-takers from graduating high school. Some had problems at home. Some had to get jobs. Many had trouble learning in a traditional school environment.

A recent study supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (http://www.essentialed.org/thesilentepidemic3-06.pdf ) found the most high school dropouts leave school because they found school uninteresting, boring, and not relevant to their lives. Most of these students had grade point averages of C or better and could have graduated. The students had the skills, but life and the school system got in the way.

Many adults expect studying for the GED to be like school, and often adult learners have even more responsibilities now than in high school: paying rent, supporting a family, and making ends meet. The good news is that the GED isn’t like school, and studying for the GED isn’t like going back to high school.

Often, students are overwhelmed by the idea of having to relearn high school, but GED test-takers don’t need to learn a whole high school curriculum to prepare for the GED. The GED exams test whether you have essential thinking skills, not a lot of facts and figures in your brain. Instead of memorizing the history of Europe or complex math equations, adult learners need to understand basic, fundamental concepts of math, science, social studies, language, and communication. And most importantly, test-takers have to think critically and solve problems. These aren’t just “school skills.” These are skills that everyone should have. And everyone can learn them.

Another problem is that, often, adults who never graduated high school didn’t learn how to learn. Studying on your own or going to adult education classes might not be right for many adult learners. Test prep books may be frustrating, and going to classes after a long day’s work may seem impossible. Fortunately, modern technology provides options. Computers and the Internet have changed our lives, and they’re also changing the way we learn. Innovative GED study programs are available online that can help students learn at their own pace. Effective programs usually focus on real-life issues and skills, and they engage learners through an entertaining and simple educational experience.

Be wary, though. Websites that offer a “GED” or “high school” diploma in 10 days or a week through an online test are usually scams. These worthless “diploma mills” charge $200 to $1,000 for a piece of paper that has no value. The real GED must be taken in person, at a test center.

Here are tips to make a study plan:

1. Take a practice test to see what skills you need to work on.

2. Find a study program that lets you focus on areas you need to improve and fits into your lifestyle and learning style.

3. Set aside an hour a day to study, starting with the areas that need the least studying.

4. When you’re ready to pass a couple of the GED test areas, schedule a test day… you’ll feel great to have passed some of the tests already.

Soon, you’ll be on your way to a GED credential, more options, and greater earning potential. The most important step in earning a GED is the first one: making a commitment to yourself and getting started on your studying. Can you pass the GED? The answer is yes, if you make the commitment.

Adults of all ages receive their GEDs each year. In 2007, Evie Eaves of Amarillo, Texas earned her GED at 97 years old, becoming the oldest GED recipient. Evie, who was born in 1910, grew up on a farm in Oklahoma where the nearest high school was a seven mile walk. Her great-granddaughter urged her to get her GED. Family, friends, and the staff at her retirement community helped Evie earn her GED, an accomplishment that made her feel she could do anything.

Let Evie’s accomplishment be an inspiration to you, too. Each week, there are new stories of people of all ages who have earned their GEDs. Twenty-two years after coming to the U.S., Vietnamese immigrant Linh Wight, after a long struggle to learn English, earned her GED in Newnan, Georgia in 2009, and days later was accepted at the University of West Georgia. It wasn’t too late for her.

Learners who achieve their GED earn pride in their accomplishment. Sherry, a GED Academy student, writes: “I passed my GED! Thanks for all of your help. Now I’ll be able to pursue my dreams of nursing”. Zaher, also a GED Academy student, writes: “I am proud that I got my GED and very happy with it, especially after I learned that no one from my country has attempted that before!”

The GED is an important achievement for most learners. It represents a triumph that they can be proud of, as well as a road to future success with a new career or a college education. Only a few years after dropping out of high school, some learners begin doubting if they’re too old to go back. They think of a GED as “high school,” for 18 or 20-year-olds… but thousands of people in their fifties, sixties, and even older get their GEDs. It’s never too late to earn a GED diploma.

If you’re ready for a fresh start, for more education, or for a better career, it’s not too late for the GED. There are many resources to help you prepare, including programs at local community colleges, adult schools, and libraries, as well as online preparation programs like the GED Academy. The learners who make a commitment to get their GEDs never regret their achievement.