ACT

So you wake up the morning of your big test and staring at you is a plate full of runny eggs.  Do you eat them?  Of course not!  Ok, that is a pretty easy call.  But what should you eat then?  Well, this is really a bigger question because it also involves what you should drink, what you should eat the night before, etc.  

Let’s start with the night before.  Athletic coaches will often tell you to load up on carbs the night before a big game. While you are not running a marathon, you will burn up a surprising amount of energy on test day – the nervousness alone accounts for a big part of that.  If you have not sat for the actual test yet, be prepared to be exhausted after!  So a bowl of pasta or a meal with some good complex carbs in it is a good idea for the night before the big day.  And stick with things that you have eaten many times before and that don’t bother your stomach (a super-spicy meal is probably not the best idea).  You don’t want to wake up on test day with a stomachache.

Additionally, you want to plan your hydration.  Part of the problem here is that you don’t want to drink too much right before the test and then have to go to the bathroom during the first section!  So try to drink a lot the day and evening before, so that the next day you are well hydrated.  However, stop drinking a few hours before bed so that you don’t wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom and then find that you can’t fall back asleep.  

Similarly, on the day of your test, don’t drink a lot too close to when your test starts.  And if you drink tea or coffee, DO NOT drink those things within an hour or possibly more of when your test starts because you will very likely have to go to the bathroom during the first section.

In terms of what to eat in the hours before your test, keep it VERY simple!  You definitely need to eat, so don’t skip eating, but if you have a nervous stomach, you do not want to risk having issues at the test.  When I personally go in and take the SAT or ACT, I am nervous enough that all I eat is bread and a little water or juice (I call this the prison diet).  And I don’t even have anything but personal pride riding on these tests anymore!  Keep in mind, I’ve eaten really well the night before and have been careful to really hydrate the day before as well.  I just don’t want to challenge my stomach in any way right before the test.  If you feel like you have an iron stomach or are just not that nervous, you could certainly push it a little further, but again I would not risk eating anything that could cause you trouble (I would avoid eggs, for example).

One last very important point:  bring a drink and snack!  I usually bring a couple of granola bars and water with me to any test I take.  I am typically less nervous by the break, so I usually feel better eating at that point.  But I am still careful not to drink too much, so as to not have to go to the bathroom in the middle of a section.  I take some sips but will not polish off the entire bottle.

Feel free to personalize the above suggestions since only you know yourself and much of the above is, of course, subjective.  But how you feed and hydrate yourself will be important factors in your test day performance.  So have a plan for what you’ll eat and drink and when you’ll do it, and you’ll be much more likely to have a great test day experience.

If you read the some of the test prep books on the market on how to ace the ACT Science, you’ll notice a strategy they all share in common: don’t read first.  The basic idea is that you should read the questions first, and then let them guide you to the places in the passage that contain the information you need.  This strategy strikes me as a bit odd: doesn’t it put the student at risk of not understanding what they need to do? 

At its core, this strategy assumes that there can be a difference between how a test is “designed” and how a test should be “taken.”   My argument is that by creating a strategy that diverges from the intent of the test, tutors and test prep professionals are opening the possibility that a student will not see the things that they need to see, since they are going to be focused on gaming the test in the way that they were taught.  (Not to mention that they will learn markedly less in general if they approach the section with this strategy.).  A good ACT Science strategy, just like a good ACT Reading strategy, should have an emphasis on understanding and purpose.

The ACT Science section, like many of the ACT sections overall, has an emphasis on ‘search and find,’ or locating specific data points or trends in the material.  In addition to this, the ACT Science tests whether you understand the nature of the scientific process by asking test takers to analyze different experiments or compare alternate theories and explanations.  

As you can see, if you approach the questions from a ‘no reading first’ strategy, you will not fully appreciate what the ACT is supposed to test.  While search and find questions may be tackled more or less reliably in this fashion, by not reading you are missing the purpose of an experiment as well as its findings.  Even if you get questions right, it will be through a side-stepping of the skill that the test writers are looking to test.  (Imagine pursuing a science degree with this sort of training under your belt?)

But even from an accuracy standpoint, it’s not entirely clear that this is the best approach.  One of the main difficulties in the ACT Science section is being able to understand what’s going on in a passage where you may not understand many of the words, or have a deep background knowledge of the subject.  If you don’t actually read the passages, you will be even more in the dark on what is happening!  Many of the questions will reference compound names, formulas, explanations, etc., and it can be potentially bewildering to the reader to try to make sense of those things and answer the questions.

It’s understandable why tutors and test prep companies would come up with this strategy: the ACT Science has a huge time crunch (even without reading the 6 passages, you have approximately 53 seconds per question).  But instead of trying to sidestep this issue by gaming the test, students should instead be taught how to read quickly, how to pick out trends while they read, and how to pick out which things are more important than others.  If you approach the passages reading like this, you will notice that you can answer most of the questions almost instantly; you’ll understand what things are, and you’ll understand what things should be.

Stat tuned for another post on how to read ACT Science passages efficiently.  Knowing what to focus on and what not to get caught up in will allow you to get the key information in a timely fashion and move on the questions with the advantage of having a broad understanding of the passages and a knowledge of where to look for the specific details needed to answer some of the questions.

In my previous post I mentioned the possibility that the SAT and ACT might one day be administered to students in the comfort of their own homes.  I cited as evidence the fact that GMAC and ETS, producers of the GMAT and GRE, had done research on that possibility for the GMAT and GRE.   Well here we are one week later and guess what? The GRE is now being offered online and the GMAT is slated to become available for online, in-home testing in a few weeks!  

The fact that this reality is already upon us is just mind-blowing.  It truly is a brave new world out there!  What does this mean for the SAT and ACT?  I predict that it is only a matter of time before the SAT and ACT are offered in-home.  It may take a while.  Possibly many years.   But it is going to happen.  

Presumably the SAT and ACT will go fully computer-based first.  The GMAT and GRE made that transition decades ago and clearly the ACT is already moving in that direction.  College Board will follow suit with the SAT.

There will be some logistical issues with offering online testing for the SAT and ACT since the scale of the endeavor is so much larger and since you have thousands upon thousands of kids who don’t have home computers and who would be disadvantaged in a world in which wealthier kids get to take the SAT and ACT at home.  But that will change and a solution will emerge.   I write this in part because as of 3 days ago I thought that the obstacles to online testing for the GMAT and GRE would be so formidable as to prevent it from becoming a reality until the distant future.  And yet, literally one week after mentioning it (more as a sort of dream scenario) in my previous post, it has become a reality. 

The age of in-home, online testing is upon us.  It may not happen tomorrow or next week or next year, but the march of progress will lead us ineluctably to the day when the SAT and ACT can be taken at home!