It's a little lengthy and I apologize!
Is a General Education Development (GED) good enough to replace a high school diploma? Many colleges, universities, and jobs think that a GED is adequate enough to replace a high school diploma while others don’t think it suffices. The General Education Development exam was originally in a GI Bill to help veterans and returning students obtain enough credentials to get civilian jobs and to also obtain a higher education beyond high school. The minimum age requirement to take the test was 18 years old but has recently been lowered to 16.
Most community colleges will accept GED holders along with a satisfactory score on the SAT or ACT. However, universities are a little more skeptical and need to see that the person applying is able to start and finish a big project; therefore, recommendation letters are required from community members to prove the person applying is motivated enough not to drop out.
In the work force almost every job that has a minimum education requirement of a high school will accept and treat a GED holder the same as a high school diploma holder. I find this interesting because one of the sources I found was against the GED and thought that it shouldn’t be a short cut for teenagers to drop out of high school and jump straight into the work force. A study done in 2002 showed that 42% of everyone that had taken the GED exam was teenagers compared to only 33% in 1991. The sad fact about this is that the students that drop out of high school and plan on getting their GED don’t get around to actually doing it. Of the 60% that dropped out of high school and then got their certificate, most likely a GED, go on to some sort of college; of that sixty percent only 10% actually go on to obtain a degree while the others drop out of college.
What I find ironic about the GED was that originally it was the United States Armed Sources that confronted the American Council on Education for a way of testing veterans and returning soldiers to get a certificate that has the same skill level as a high school diploma and now the Air Force is only permitted to have 1% of its enlistees have a GED and the Army is only aloud to have 10% of its enlistees to have a GED. This is because that most of the people that enlist with a GED typically are expelled or quite after their first tour of duty.
I don’t think that the General Education Development is not an adequate test to give a person the credentials that a person with a high school diploma has. Along with specific skills that are learned in high school, GED holders don’t have a lot of the social skills that high school students do. For example, GED holders don’t have the motivation high school students do to finish large projects or to complete a goal. This is why most universities require satisfactory SAT or ACT scores and recommendation letters from community members. I believe that the age limit for taking the GED should be raised yet again to motivate high school students to finish in school rather than dropping out and taking the short cut. The GED exam shouldn’t be an alternate route for high school; it should be a last resort for those who can’t finish high school for financial or family issues.
Work Cited:
Thornburgh, Nathan. "Does a GED Really do the Job?." Time. 11 April 2006: Print.
"DiplomaGuide.com." Is the GED Enough to Get ME into College?. 2006-2011. Web. 1 Mar 2011.
"Howard Lee speaks out." YouTube. Web. 1 Mar 2011.
"General Education Development." Wikipedia, Web.
Hi Sam,
ReplyDeleteThanks for your Discourse Analysis paper--I can see that you thought about our conversation. I think you are much closer to your researched website than you were before we talked.
I'm glad you were able to get your paper put together as quickly as you did. While I think it has a lot of good elements (your confident writing voice, your sources, etc.), I have a few pointers that should help you get it stronger. I was a little concerned with how you used your sources--your lack of exact citations undercuts your reliability, especially where this analysis was so much about others' work.
You make an arguable claim at the end of your paper, but I was hoping it would be a little more nuanced: you are dangerously close to labeling the GED as "bad." The claim that you make is very under-supported and broad. It would probably take a novel-length work to adequately do the job, so you might consider narrowing and thinking a little more deeply about what you want to say. As the assignment description says, the main purpose of the paper is to "look at how a particular community is talking about the problems your service-learning agency addresses." You have an excellent problem, now you just need to focus on narrowing it and looking more specifically about what's to be done about it.