The GED Program at NMJC

“Graduating high school is one of the most important things people do because you cannot go anywhere or do anything without a diploma,” say Jill Johnson, Lea County GED Examiner.

By analogy, a high school diploma is the foundation that your “career house” will be built on. You can add several floors to this house by increasing your education, but you need the basics, e.g. Language Arts (Reading and Writing), Social Studies, Science and Math, to do so. Without those basics, your foundation will have flaws in it and will barely be able to support the first floor, much less a second.

The GED tests have been designed to strengthen your foundation by reiterating those basics and placing you where you need to be academically in order to proceed.

“This is the first year that NMJC has had this program. It was at Hobbs High School,” states Johnson. The program resides in the Adult Distance Education (ADE) department in Transitional Studies.

How the GED program works here is that first a practice test is given. If a person scores high enough to pass, they are given the official test. However, if someone takes the practice test and shows deficiencies in certain areas, they will have to study the sections in which they need improvement on and retake the practice quiz.

“The reason we do that is so we don’t set someone up for defeat. We also have found that by doing this, we’ve had an 85-90% pass rate,” says Johnson.

Passing the GED is like most things, you usually get out of it what you put into it.