How to Pass the GED Math Test (Even If You're Not a Math Person)

Picture this. Twenty minutes left, eleven questions to go, and you’ve just spent six minutes on one question about a cone.

That’s how a lot of GED math tests are lost. Not on math you can’t do, but on time, blanks and small slips on questions you could have done.

The good news? You need 145 out of 200 to pass, and that leaves room for mistakes. So in this guide you’ll get:

• A time plan for the 115 minutes, and a rule for when to skip
• Why you should never leave a question blank
• Two shortcuts that turn algebra and money questions into quick checks
• What to do if your mind goes blank, plus a checklist for the week before

These are habits for the test room itself. For what to study and when, use the study guide.

If math is the last subject standing for you, you’re in the biggest group there is. And if it’s been years, walking into this test can feel scary. That’s normal, and every tactic below makes it a little less so.

Let’s start with the clock.

Tactic 1: Beat the clock with a simple time plan

The test is about 46 questions in 115 minutes, in two parts. That time includes about two minutes of instructions and a three-minute break, so you really have about 110 minutes of work.

Here’s where time goes wrong. Most people who run out of time weren’t slow on every question. They got stuck on two or three and lost five or six minutes on each.

Think of a checkout line. One price check can hold up everyone behind it. A hard question does the same thing to the easy questions waiting after it.

A time plan you can follow

The instructions, the two parts and the break are official. The 8, 92 and 10 minute split is our suggestion.

At the start, write two numbers on your note board: 55 and 10. Around question 20 of Part 2, the clock should show about 55 minutes left. At 10 minutes left, you stop and review.

Bottom line: no single question is worth more than about two minutes. Protect the easy ones waiting behind the hard one.

The 30-second skip rule

After 30 seconds on a question, you should know your first step. You don’t need the answer yet, only a way in.

If you’ve read it twice and still don’t know where to start, pick your best answer, flag it and move on.

Picking an answer before you flag matters. If time runs out, that question still has something in it.

GED Testing Service has a tour of the test screen that shows the flag button, calculator and reference sheets. Click through it once before test day so nothing on the screen surprises you.

The last ten minutes: fill every blank

Nothing GED Testing Service publishes describes a penalty for a wrong answer. Your score comes from what you get right, so an empty question can only ever score zero.

Picture four socks in a drawer, and only one is the match. Grab one without looking and you have a 1 in 4 chance. Toss out one sock you know is wrong first, and it’s 1 in 3. Guessing on a four-choice question works the same way.

At ten minutes left, stop starting new work and go in this order:

1. Answer every blank, even with a guess.
2. Re-check every number you typed into a box. Fill-in answers have no choices to catch a typo.
3. Go back to flagged questions, starting with the ones where you had a plan.
4. Only change an answer if you can say exactly what was wrong with it.

Tactic 2: Warm up for the five no-calculator questions

The test opens with about five questions and no calculator. They aren’t harder than the rest.

The trouble is timing. They come right after the ID check and the tutorial, when your nerves are at their highest. And they ask for arithmetic most adults haven’t done by hand in years.

GED Testing Service’s own math skills review lists no-calculator questions as one of the places people most often lose points.

Think of it like stretching before a walk. A few minutes of warm-up makes the first stretch of road feel a lot easier. Here’s how to warm up:

• Start every study session with ten minutes of work by hand: multiplying, dividing, adding fractions, finding 10% or 15% of a number.
• On test morning, do five quick problems by hand before you leave.
• Expect tidy numbers. Part 1 is written to be done by hand, so if you get something like 7.384, read the question again.

Practice with number sense and operations and fractions, decimals and percents. For Part 2, get to know the TI-30XS calculator.

Tactic 3: Let the answer choices do the work

On a multiple-choice algebra question, the right answer is already on the screen. It’s one of the four choices.

So you can test the choices instead of solving the equation. It’s like a ring of keys at a door you don’t know. You try them until one turns. Putting a number back into the question is plain arithmetic, and that’s usually easier than the algebra.

This works when the choices are plain numbers. It won’t help when the choices are expressions or graphs, or on fill-in-the-blank questions.

It’s especially handy on word problems. Run each choice through the story and keep the one that fits. Practice it with equations and inequalities.

Tactic 4: Estimate first, so a typo can’t fool you

Before you touch the calculator, round the numbers and get a rough answer in your head.

It’s like adding up your cart in your head on the way to the register. If the total comes to about what you expected, fine. If it’s ten times that, something got scanned wrong.

It takes about ten seconds, and it catches the most common calculator slips, like a missed decimal point or a mistyped digit.

If you’d typed something wrong and got $5,817.40 or $58.17, the estimate would catch it right away. It also protects you from $171.10, a likely wrong choice for anyone who found the area and stopped there.

Tactic 5: Check the units before you click

Wrong choices often have the right number with the wrong unit. That’s on purpose. The question is checking whether you know what you just measured.

Picture a backyard. The fence around it is measured in feet. The grass that covers it is in square feet. The sand that fills the sandbox is in cubic feet. Same yard, three kinds of units:

• Plain units (feet, inches, cm): length, perimeter, distance around a circle.
• Square units: area, or how much it takes to cover something.
• Cubic units: volume, or how much fits inside.

So if a question asks how much water a tank holds, the answer is in cubic units. Before you click, look at the unit on the choice as well as the number. Practice with geometry and measurement.

Tactic 6: Open the formula sheet first

You get a formula sheet for the whole test, including the no-calculator part. On any geometry question, open it before you start.

It’s like checking the recipe instead of guessing how much baking soda goes in. Reading the cone formula takes a few seconds. Half-remembering it can cost you the question.

Learn where things sit on the sheet before test day with our formula sheet guide.

Tactic 7: Have a plan for when your mind goes blank

It happens to a lot of people, often a few questions in. You read a question and the words slide right past you.

Telling yourself to calm down rarely works. Having steps ready does:

1. Put the marker down and read only the last sentence, the one that asks the question.
2. Write what you know, each number with its unit, like “32 = length in feet”. Writing often gets you moving again.
3. Name the type of question: percent, area, rate or solve for x. That usually suggests a first step.
4. Still stuck after a minute? Pick an answer, flag it and go on. The next question might be one you know well.

Decide ahead of time to look at the clock only three times: at the start of Part 2, halfway through, and at ten minutes left. Checking after every question just adds worry.

And if the day goes badly, you can take it again. At a test center you get two retakes with no wait (online, one), and the subjects you’ve already passed don’t expire.

Tactic 8: Make test day feel familiar

Don’t start new topics in the last few days. Something half-learned tends to fall apart under pressure, and it eats time.

Use the week the way you’d drive to a new job once before your first shift. Nothing on the day should be a surprise. Here’s the plan, with arrival times and note boards from GED Testing Service’s test day guide: