The KRA/VIEW (Virginia Initiative for Employment not Welfare) Program in Norfolk, Virginia, is offering tutoring services to those customers who need to complete GED training, testing, and credentialing before the end of 2013, as part of its GED® Preparation Program. On January 2, 2014, the GED® Testing Service (GTS) will issue a new Test and testing system, with no “grandfather” provision for those who started, but did not complete one or more subtests of the current 2002 version. According to Tiffany Haynes, KRA/VIEW Lead Instructor, “The current test has five subtests. If a customer, for instance, passes four subtests, he or she only has to re-take the one failed subtest. Some of our customers are now in that phase of their preparation, and they need to ‘graduate’ before the new test is released.
Our experience shows that the Math subtest* is the most challenging for our customers. So, we’ve added a tutor to our current GED prep program. She is a KRA customer, who enrolled in VIEW after being released from a term of incarceration, and scored so high on the TABE (Test of Adult Basic Education), we were confident she would do well on the GED. We were right…she passed all five subtests, each of which are timed and quite challenging, the first time! So, I asked if she would volunteer to offer peer-tutoring, especially in Math. She agreed, and for several months now has been volunteering an average of 30 hours a week tutoring other GED student-customers.”
Haynes continued, “KRA/VIEW is committed to helping its customers advance their education, through the GED process, as part of our mission to provide effective job-readiness development services. As active participants in the GTS outreach campaign to educate test-takers about the ‘2002 Series Closeout’, we are equipping our customers with the information and tools they need to finish the 2002 Series before December 31st. As part of the campaign, GTS provides materials to help communicate the closeout to organizations, such as KRA, at the community level. So, right now, our awareness campaign serves two populations…customers who anticipate taking the 2014 Test, and those who want to start and/or complete the 2002 Test.”
*Number Operations/Sense; Measurements and Geometry; Data Analysis, Statistics, and Probability; and Algebra (50 questions/90 minutes).