FEES imposed in taking General Educational Development tests are proposed to be raised by as much as 300 percent to help the Northern Marianas College keep up with the cost of conducting the examinations.
According to Fe. Y. Calixterio, Adult Basic Education and GED director, they are proposing to raise the GED test fee to $20 per subject from $5.
“We’re exploring the possibility of charging higher GED test fee because the cost of conducting the examinations has gone up,” Calixterio told Variety.
The GED program is jointly sponsored by the American Council on Education and State, provincial and territorial departments of education. It is one of the five instructional programs under Calixterio’s office.
A series of five tests must be taken and passed to get a GED diploma which is a nationally recognized high school equivalency for the past 50 years.
ABE funds were previously used to pay the wages of the examiners but the federal government disapproved the practice stressing that GED is different from the ABE program.
Calixterio said that although GED students have to pay for taking the examinations, the classes are free.
The NMC Board of Regents will discuss the proposed changes in their regular meeting scheduled tomorrow.
Calixterio said ABE spends more than $12,000 every year to conduct the series of GED tests for 130 examinees alone throughout the commonwealth.
More than $9,000 of this amount goes to the examiners’ pay and travel expenses. Test materials, mailing the test results, among other things, costs over $2,000.
The CNMI government has perennially encouraged local residents who failed to get their high school diploma to get a GED to make them more competitive in the mainstream workforce.
The ABE/GED program has been going on in the CNMI for the past 30 years.
Hundreds of local residents have already benefited from the program.
