“The tests, when they were redesigned, were made more difficult, and there was some speculation that candidates were waiting for others to take it first to see what it was like,” Ruffini says.
The number of test-takers has risen again since 2002. From 2002 to 2003, the number of test-takers increased by 17.9 percent, with another 1.3 percent jump from 2003 to 2004. Also, the number of test-takers who took all five subjects (math, science, reading, writing and social studies) in the test battery increased 3.2 percent from 2003 to 2004, and the number of people who finished the entire battery rose 4.7 percent during that time frame.
Just over 55 percent of the 665,927 people who took the GED in the United States in 2004 were White. Nearly 22 percent of the test-takers were Black and about 18 percent were Hispanic. Approximately 570,200 people took all five sections of the test, and 405,724 passed.
ACE started tracking GED results by race in 2002, and Ruffini says the organization has not yet looked into why different ethnic groups take the GED at rates not close to their proportion of the U.S. population.
“At this point, we haven’t looked at the reasons for testing by ethnic group,” he says. “We have a wealth of data available to us since we went to automatic scoring, we just haven’t had enough time to look at a lot of different combinations of variables. This is one that’s important to us that we’ll be exploring in more depth.”
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
