The General Educational Development Tests (High School Level) as a Predictor of Educational Level and Mental Ability

Abstract

THE ARMED Forces Institute Tests of General Educational De velopment (GED), High School Form, 1 are intended to measure the extent to which all of the past educational experiences of an individual, including military experiences, have contributed to his general educa tional growth. Consequently, they have been widely used to determine whether individuals who had not completed four years of formal second ary school education had attained a level of educational development comparable to those who had completed secondary school. According ly, these tests have been used to decide whether a veteran should re ceive a high school diploma or equivalency certificate even though he had not formally completed high school. The High School Level has seven equivalent forms and consists of five subtests: (1) Correctness and Effectiveness of Expression, (2) Interpretation of Reading Materials in Social Studies, (3) Interpreta tion of Reading Materials in the Natural Sciences, (4) Interpretation of Literary Materials, and (5) General Mathematical Ability. Despite their wide application, the GED tests, especially the High School Level, are surprisingly lacking in validity data, a situation not ed by Conrad in his review (3). Most evaluations of the GED concern its ability to predict scholastic performance rather than measure edu cational growth. Dressel and Schmid (4) have summarized a number of such studies in which the High School Level was correlated with high school and college grade-point averages. For college grades the aver age GED score had higher correlations than did any of the individual subtests, the range being from . 24 to .72. The Social Studies subtest appeared to be the best single predictor. When compared with other commonly used educational measures of ability, such as the ACE and OSU, both the High School and College Level GED had comparable if not superior power to predict college grades. The general conclusion from these data seems to be that the GED shows promise of being one of the best predictors of college grades, although it was not designed to be such.