Learning from Experience

Elizabeth Santiago
SABES Central Resource Center, World Education

The following is a short description of my experiences as a GED recipient. Through it, I advocate for a non-traditional form of assessment to be used as a way of evaluating my potential or capability as a college student and member of society. I wanted to write about the choices I’ve made in the hopes that educators, employers, and peers will understand that sometimes no standar-dized tests can judge a person’s ability, and that above all, personal or life experience should be valued.

Early in 1986, I made a decision that changed my life; I stopped going to high school. I have to admit that it wasn’t a very tough decision because I thought I was doing the right thing for me. I was the youngest of nine children and the fourth high school dropout. All my brothers and sisters were content with their lives and the jobs they had. Because of this, I believed the key to a happy life was to find a “good” job.

I filled out job applications at every office in town, but had great difficulty getting interviews. My brothers and sisters grew up in a different time, a time when there wasn’t much competition for entry level work.

I re-evaluated things. I came to believe that the key to a happy life was a combination of many things held together by education. I decided to get my GED (General Educational Development). I went to Action for Boston Community Development (ABCD) and signed up for classes. I was given a placement test and put in a high level class. Six months after entering the GED program, I took the five tests and passed.

Upon receiving my GED in 1987, I found an entry level job in the business world as a data entry operator. I was grateful for the opportunity to work, learn, and better myself, but was disturbed by the misconceptions of me as a GED recipient. Some people stereotyped me as not being bright or taking the easy way out because they felt the GED tests weren’t as challenging as going through traditional high school. Or they had preconceived ideas of how someone who left high school would be. These experiences made me work twice as hard to get taken seriously. I felt I had something to prove because I knew I could do the job.

I was given a promotion to workflow administrator after six months. I wasn’t thrilled with the work I was doing, but I didn’t have any other skills than what I learned on the job. I wanted and needed more education to get further ahead in my life. Emerson College in Boston offered a good program so I made a trip to the school for an application. When I started to fill out the application, I couldn’t complete the section that asked about your high school scores and grades. I wasn’t sure what to show the school to prove I was capable of attend-ing. I went back to the admissions office and had a discussion with one of the counselors. I was told that since I didn’t have high school transcripts or SAT scores for them to draw a conclusion about my potential they wouldn’t accept me to the school. I had to show them that I was able to do college level material.

I ended up taking two courses at Emerson without applying as a student. The thought was that if I did well, I could use these grades as transcripts. I did well in both courses and took two more before officially applying to the school. I also did well in the second set of courses. The following semester I made an appointment to see the same guidance counselor. I brought a portfolio of all of my class assignments from the four classes. We began talking and he looked over my grades from each of my classes. I pulled out my portfolio of papers, tests, projects, even work that I did during the day for him to review and he was impressed. What got me accepted to the school above all was a 40-page draft of a screenplay that I did in a senior level class that was graded A- by a tough professor.

I still attend school part-time in the evenings. It has been five years and I still have a few years left to go before I receive my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Writing, Literature, and Publishing. No matter, I know I will finish. I have talked to other GED recipients who have said they stopped telling people they are GED graduates because it’s easier to say ‘I graduated from such and such high school.’ I think about this all the time. I always want to tell people that I am a GED recipient. Mainly because I am proud, but partly because I want to help change someone’s attitude about what the people who receive GEDs are able to accomplish. I hope by writing my story I can share my belief that the GED is not a guarantee of anything. It is just the foundation you need to keep your options open and your choices broad.

This article was published in Adventures in Assessment, Volume 7 (December 1994), SABES/World Education, Boston, MA, Copyright 1994.

Funding support for the publication of this document on the Web provided in part by the Ohio State Literacy Resource Center as part of the LINCS Assessment Special Collection.