Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Science: GED and HiSET Science — experiments, results and content.
← GED and HiSET
Ninety minutes on the GED, eighty on the HiSET, and on both it is a reading and reasoning test that happens to use science as its material.
The GED names three things: reading for meaning in science, designing and interpreting science experiments, and using numbers and graphics in science. The HiSET asks you to use science content knowledge, apply the principles of scientific inquiry, and interpret and evaluate scientific information.
The middle item on both lists is the one that decides marks. Experimental reasoning — what the independent variable is, what the control is for, what a result does and does not establish — is examined on every paper and is the part least likely to be covered by revising content. You can know what photosynthesis is and still lose a question that asks which of four experiments would test whether light intensity affects the rate of it.
The content itself spans life science, physical science and earth and space science, at roughly the level of a general high school course: cells and body systems, heredity, ecosystems and energy flow, atoms and compounds, chemical and physical change, forces and motion, energy and its transfers, the water and carbon cycles, weather, and the solar system.
Ten questions, weighted the way both exams weight them: a few on content that recurs, and the rest on reading a described experiment or a small set of results. Every experiment is invented, and every number is small enough to check in your head.
The distractors are the reasoning errors, named in each explanation — a conclusion the data do not support, a variable that was never controlled, a correlation read as a cause, a result generalised beyond the conditions it was measured under.
There are no images here, and both real papers use diagrams, graphs and tables heavily. For that specific skill, use the free practice tests both organisations publish, and practise reading a graph's axes and units before its shape.
