Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Social Studies: GED and HiSET Social Studies — sources, concepts and figures.
← GED and HiSET
Seventy minutes on both exams, no break on the GED, and far less about remembering dates than most people expect.
The GED describes this test in three parts: reading for meaning in social studies, analysing historical events and arguments, and using numbers and graphs in social studies. The HiSET describes its subtest as analysing and evaluating information across history, political science, psychology, sociology, anthropology, geography and economics.
Read those two descriptions side by side and the same thing is being asked in both: can you read a source, or a set of figures, and say what it establishes? The subject content is the material the reading is done on, not the thing being examined. A candidate who knows a great deal of history and cannot read a document for its argument will do worse here than one who knows less and can.
Three question shapes carry most of the paper:
Ten questions spread across civics and government, United States and world history, economics, and geography. Roughly half hang off an embedded source or a small set of figures written out in words, because that is the shape of both exams.
Political and economic questions are written descriptively throughout. They ask what a position holds, what a constitutional arrangement does, what a set of figures shows — never which policy is better or which side is right. Where a fact is genuinely contested, the question says so rather than picking.
Every source is invented or quoted from a document in the public domain, and where a public-domain document is quoted the words are the real words. There are no images, while the real papers use maps, cartoons and charts; for those, use the free practice tests both organisations publish.
