A research program has been under way for several years in the Civil Engineering Department at the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) that has included the construction and testing to failure of carefully monitored 3m high models of geogrid reinforced soil walls. Concurrent with the laboratory work, a finite-element program (GEOFEM) has been developed to meet the unique requirements of geosynthetic reinforced-soil wall systems including: incremental construction, interface elements to simulate geosynthetic-soil interaction and a non-linear geosynthetic force-strain model. The results from carefully instrumented RMC tests have been used to calibrate the program and allow parametric analyses to be carried out. The paper reviews experimental results for a propped panel wall taken to failure under uniform surcharge pressure and describes the results of a finite element simulation of the test. Program GEOFEM was used to make Class C predictions of panel displacements, grid strains and footing restraining forces prior to and at incipient collapse during surcharging.