General Education
General Education tests the breadth expected of a teacher: college-level communication in English and Filipino, quantitative reasoning, science, social studies, and basic ICT. Items are usually short applications, not recall of isolated facts, so name the strand and the rule before choosing.
Core rules to apply
- Communication: For grammar, find the subject and verb, ignore interrupters, and check pronoun reference, tense consistency, and parallelism. For reading, answer from the passage, not from outside knowledge.
- Quantitative reasoning: Translate words into an equation; keep units; use inverse operations; check whether a percent change is applied to the original or the new base.
- Science: Identify variables, controls, and whether a conclusion follows from evidence; distinguish observation from inference.
- Social studies: Use chronology, cause and effect, and source type (primary vs secondary). Do not confuse primary sources with biased sources.
- ICT: Know basic file management, spreadsheet cell references, and netiquette/safety.
Worked example
An item says: “A PHP 800 shirt is discounted 15%, then an extra 10% is taken off the discounted price. What is the final price?” Do not add 15% + 10%. First discount: 800 × 0.85 = 680. Second discount applies to 680: 680 × 0.90 = 612. Final price is PHP 612. The trap answer, PHP 600, comes from applying 25% to the original price.
Traps that cost marks
- Adding successive percent discounts.
- Choosing a grammatically correct sentence that changes the passage’s meaning.
- Treating a correlation in a science passage as proof of causation.
- Reading social-studies items as opinion when the stem asks for evidence.