150 minutes on the official test
GED Reasoning Through Language Arts Practice
RLA is the longest section of the GED at 150 minutes, and the only one with a full essay. This page covers all three of its parts with a 24-question practice test and targeted drills.
Take Practice Test 1 — 24 questionsTopic drills
How the RLA test is built
The test runs 150 minutes in three blocks. The first and third blocks are multiple choice and drag-and-drop items covering reading comprehension and language conventions. Between them sits a 45-minute Extended Response, where you read two short passages that argue opposite sides of an issue and write an essay explaining which is better supported.
About 75 percent of the reading passages are informational — workplace documents, historical texts, science and social studies writing — and about 25 percent are literary. If you have been practicing only with novels, shift toward nonfiction.
What the Extended Response is really scoring
The essay prompt never asks which position you personally agree with. It asks which passage argues its case more effectively, using evidence drawn from the text. Test takers lose points most often by writing a strong personal opinion essay that never cites the passages — an essay that could have been written without reading them at all.
Three traits are scored: how well you analyze the argument and use evidence, how clearly your response is organized, and how well you handle sentence structure and conventions. A plain, well-organized essay with specific quotations outscores an elaborate one that stays general.
Grammar carries more weight than people expect
Language convention items are embedded in passages, where you choose the version of a sentence that is correct in context. The recurring targets are subject-verb agreement across intervening phrases, pronoun case and agreement, comma splices and run-ons, apostrophes, verb tense consistency, and misplaced or dangling modifiers.
These rules are finite and learnable in a way that reading comprehension is not, which makes grammar the most efficient place to gain points quickly on this section.
Frequently asked questions
- What score do I need to pass GED RLA?
- 145 out of 200. The multiple-choice items and the Extended Response combine into one reported score.
- How long should the GED essay be?
- There is no required length, but a well-developed response is generally four to seven paragraphs written within the 45-minute window.
- Is spelling graded on the GED?
- Spelling is not scored directly on multiple-choice items, but conventions including spelling are part of the essay's scoring.