ACT

As a full-time, professional tutor, I periodically take the exams that I teach. I do this for a variety of reasons. For one, I am always on the hunt for a perfect score and I have not yet achieved that on the ACT. It’s also nice for me to be able to see some recent questions so that I can stay fresh on exactly what is most current with the tests (although I also get to see most of the questions when I go over the released tests with my students). But perhaps most importantly it is really useful for me to put myself in the situation of my students periodically so that I remember exactly what the experience feels like – doing so helps me provide really good advice about the test day experience, managing stress, dealing with the time constraints of the test, etc.

So my most recent test taking experience was the June ACT and I thought I would post some observations, both about the test itself and my experience taking it (for those of you who don’t know, yes adults are allowed to take the SAT and ACT!!!)…

First of all, I have taken the SAT and ACT 5 times as an adult now and I have yet to have a student say a word to me during the experience. This time there was a girl who was really close to talking to me. During one of the brakes she kept looking at me and at one point it seemed that she was on the verge of saying something to me, but then she chickened out! Oh well.

Overall it is a pretty bizarre experience being the only adult taking the test but I have sort of gotten used to it. But I always forget how stressful the experience is, even for me, a person who really has nothing riding on the results of the test (except personal pride). And since the ACT is so much tighter on time, there is really not even a moment to pause and think except during the break and even that goes by quickly (I wolfed down a granola bar and apple and then went to the bathroom and only barely had time to do that).

In terms of the ACT itself, I cannot yet discuss individual questions but there are some high level observations that I can make….

First of all, there were some strange and very difficult questions scattered into some of the sections. The Math section had what seemed to me to be the hardest Math question that I have ever seen on the SAT or ACT. In fact, it would almost be too hard for the GMAT or GRE (I even tried a modified version of the question with one of my star GMAT students and he was pretty stumped). I honestly don’t know what the ACT writers were thinking including a question like that. I might have misinterpreted it but I am pretty sure that I did not. This is one reason that I prefer the SAT to the ACT – ignoring the egregious error in timing that just occurred on the June SAT, the SAT is just a better made test with questions that seem to be more properly vetted, etc. Every once in a while I see an ACT question that just seems to fundamentally flawed – this almost never happens on the SAT. Anyway this particular Math question was just off the charts and honestly almost derailed my whole Math section (I had to skip the question and come back to it at the end, but this caused me to rush and I barely finished on time).

There were also a couple of strange questions on the English section that made that section pretty difficult and that also derailed my timing efforts on the section. Again I finished, but just barely.

Another surprise was that the Science section had 6 instead of 7 passages. Apparently this is a switch that was made on the February test and appears to be a trend that will continue, but I was unaware of it so that was an additional surprise. In the end this is a good change since it makes time management on the Science section a little more reasonable, but knowing about it in advance would definitely have allowed me to be better prepared about how much time I would spend on each passage (essentially now 6 minutes per passage instead of 5 minutes per passage).

All-in-all I thought the test was pretty hard. The Reading section was probably the exception to this, but because of the somewhat questionable and very difficult questions on the English and Math sections, the test definitely felt like it was on the slightly more difficult side. Scores will begin to be released on Tuesday the 23rd, so I will just have to wait until then to know how it all turned out!

This is the second post in my series on “Reasons Not to Worry.” Again my motivation here is to try to reduce the level of stress for people since it is really heart-wrenching for me to see some of my students worry obsessively about the test. A little bit of worry is often healthy because it motivates you into action, but when that worry becomes all-consuming it is no longer productive and it makes me very sad to see this sort of thing happen with students.

So, in the previous “Reasons Not to Worry” post I wrote about the fact that “score totals” don’t matter as much as individual section scores and the fact that you can retake the SAT multiple times to try to get better section scores. In this post, I would like to continue that theme of not putting too much emphasis on any one test sitting by discussing two more related points.

First of all, the SAT is only one of the standardized test options – there is always the ACT. All schools now accept both the SAT and ACT without bias. It doesn’t matter which test you take. Here on the East coast most people still take the SAT, but a growing number of students opt for the ACT and a seemingly bigger number opt to take both. In fact, many of the students that I tutor who do very, very well on the SAT end up taking the ACT also, just to give themselves an opportunity to shine on a different exam.

There are 2 significant points to make about the ACT that are relevant to this discussion. First of all, if things are not going that well with the SAT, it might be that you are better off with the ACT, so again there is no reason to get overly stressed or overly upset about the SAT. A second important point is that if you consider that you could take the SAT 3 or 4 or even 5 times and that you could do the same with the ACT, you could theoretically have upwards of 10 chances to shine on these college entrance examinations. To some people that would sound like a nightmare scenario and I don’t mean to imply that that would be ideal – obviously most people want to be done with the SAT/ACT as quickly as possible. I only mean to suggest that one need not get so stressed about how the test is going to go because most students take these exams multiple times and really there is almost no limit to how many chances you have to perform well. I have had many students who have taken both exams 3 times and I have had some who have taken them more. Additionally I have had some students who didn’t really have succesful outings for the first 4 or 5 tries and then finally after taking the SAT 3 times and then the ACT 4 times (or something like that) finally nailed it and achieved the score that they were hoping for. Again the point is that no one sitting of the test matters that much and for many people it takes a handful of tries to either piece together a really good score (through superscoring) or achieve the kind of single test performance that they were looking for.

There is one more point to make. Increasingly schools are choosing not to require the SAT or ACT. Now, most schools still require them and I think that most of the top schools (the Harvards and Yales, etc.) will probably always require them, but there are some excellent schools out there that are now test optional. Some examples include Bowdoin, Wesleyan, Brandeis, Wake Forest and hundreds of others, including many top schools. If you would like to learn more, visit http://www.fairtest.org/ (this is one of the organizations that is spearheading the push to get colleges to demphasize or completely do away with standardized testing). If you want to go right to a list of the top schools that are “test optional” go to http://www.fairtest.org/sites/default/files/Optional-Schools-in-U.S.News-Top-Tiers.pdf.

So again, these are just some more reasons not to worry. Between the SAT and ACT there is almost no limit to how many times you can take the test in order to achieve a score that you are happy with. And if all else fails, there are many hundreds of schools, even top-ranked ones, that don’t even require any standardized tests at all. There are still more reasons not to get too upset or worried about the SAT/ACT, reasons that I will touch on in future posts, so stay tuned!