Ivy League Grads Can’t Pass the New GED

The Daily Beast reports:

The number of people who passed the GED—the high school equivalency test long seen as a “good enough diploma”—plummeted this year. About 86,500 people passed the new test in 2014, compared with 540,535 in 2013.

The GED administered in 2014 was dramatically tougher than its previous iteration, which had been in use since 2002. The GED Testing Service overhauled the test to align with Common Core standards and rebut a growing consensus that the test didn’t actually indicate if someone had learned what they would have in high school.

The new test is hard for high-school dropouts, sure. But what would it be like for those of us who made it through high school and college?

I’m a reasonably smart person: I scored 1370 on my SATs back in high school, went to a good college, just got a master’s degree from Columbia, and tend to be a strong member of a bar trivia team. So I searched online, found a test aligned with the new, harder GED, and printed out the 169-page behemoth. I figured I’d spend a couple hours on Saturday working through the test and ace the thing. Surely it couldn’t be that difficult.

The testing times of American education.