During the last few months, I have met many learners, educators, program administrators, and employers in person. This is my favorite part of my position as President and CEO at the GED Testing Service. It is truly energizing to be in a room full of like-minded professionals who are there to help, guide, and empower adult learners to change their lives and discover their full potential!

I am particularly glad this April, being Community College Awareness Month, that we can celebrate with so many of our education partners at various community colleges around the country, as well as state programs. This includes the recent celebration that we had the privilege to join the Coalition of Adult Basic Education as they celebrated their 25^th Anniversary with a great conference in Nashville.

At the recent COABE Conference, I was honored to share the stage with inspiring educators like Kelly Mobray, Director of Adult Education from the Salina Public Schools in Kansas and Gregory Larson, GED Coordinator from Los Angeles City College, as well as Alicia Kouparitsas, Chief Customer Officer with WithYouWithMe, our GED Tech Apprenticeship partner. During this session we shared success stories from programs that were innovative in providing GED learners with the additional services and support they needed to succeed. We continue to be so grateful and inspired by the fantastic work all educators and administrators offer every day to offer the best possible educational journey for our learners.

To fully understand the GED^® test, it is best to understand how the GED is developed. To ensure the integrity of the test, every item used on a GED test and GED Ready^® practice test undergoes a rigorous review process across several stages, including initial development of the content, expert content reviews, committee reviews, field testing, data reviews, and forms construction. Multiple quality checks by internal and external experts are completed throughout the process, ensuring the accuracy and validity of all GED content.

Spotlight on….is the first of a series of articles about the GED administrators and educators around the country and around the world. We are starting this series with the State of Alaska!

It has been a while since we have talked about the GED Mobile app. A lot has happened in such a short amount of time, we would love to get you caught up!

You may recall when we last connected in October 2023, we shared that 60% of GED learners do not do anything within a year of creating their account and that we are working to solve this problem with the App. We shared that we designed the app for the independent learner. Our research revealed that the primary need for this learner is confidence building, guidance, support, and study. We shared that the app will be useful alongside the website, not in lieu of. And we mentioned that we would be beta testing soon.

Let us fast forward to where we are now…

We launched a beta app in early February in record time. We have more than 400 independent learners using the app and helping us to fine tune it for a broader audience.

During beta we are learning a lot about the app from these learners. We learned what friction points exist and are adjusting the app to be more usable. We learned that the app is helping learners to study. It is boosting confidence in that 50% are now confident or very confident about taking their tests, compared to 22% before using the App. And it is improving their overall understanding of what they need to do to complete the GED– 79% say they have good or complete understanding of the steps they need to take to accomplish their GED, compared to 57% before using the App. There are lots of other data points we are studying. These are key because they reveal that the app is providing enough value and all the data suggests that we can bring the app to a broader population and make an impact for these learners.

We recently invited a group of Teachers and Administrators to look at the app. We are asking them to let us know if they see any potential for it in the classroom in its current state and to offer ideas on how we could adjust in the future to be a companion in the classroom. While we are currently focusing on the independent learner, this app will be ever evolving, and we need input from current users and future users.

There are a lot of apps that claim to help with the GED. Some are useful. Some are not. This is the ONLY official mobile app from GED Testing Service, designed and created by the company that created the GED test. We have the benefit of outcomes tracking with mobile app users, allowing us to modify and change the experience based on thousands of data points. All these factors set our app apart from all others.

We are excited for this opportunity to connect with and support our learners in a whole new way. We are working hard to learn as much as possible from our beta users and will make the necessary adjustments to bring the app to a broader audience very soon. We expect to be in the Apple app store by the time we see you at the conference in July!