Benefits of the ACT

With the ever-present spectre of college applications looming less than a year away, a college bound junior’s mind is invariably drawn to ways to make themselves more appealing to prospective colleges; things such as picking up an extra extra-curricular activity, or volunteering at a local charity. The foremost concern is which of the two standardized college tests to take: the ACT or SAT. Second only to GPA, these two tests are among the largest factors in deciding what college you do (or don’t) get into. With this in mind, in order to maximize one’s test scores, it is crucial to choose the correct test.Initially, it might appear that the SAT is the easier test, with nearly a third again as much time to answer a similar number of questions to the ACT. However, initial appearances are deceiving. The ACT might appear to be a beast at first glance, but upon closer consideration, its inherent qualities become apparent.Speaking as someone who has taken both tests a number of times, the questions on the ACT are, as a whole, easier. Take the English section, for instance. The SAT recently remodeled the way it tests vocabulary. Rather than giving a word and asking for its meaning, as the ACT does, it demands that a given word be identified by context clues. Whereas a student decently versed in the English language with its prefixes and suffixes might breeze through a vocabulary section with minimal difficulty on the ACT, that same student is hamstrung and forced to read and reread lines of prose in order to discern the meaning of a single word. This means that not only are the problems trickier, in that a student might circle a synonym for the word in a different concept, the questions also take longer to complete, negating the advantage of the extra time provided by the SAT.This increased difficulty is similarly apparent in the math section. The two tests cover the same breadth of topics, from pre-algebra to some rudimentary trigonometry. The SAT has much more difficult questions, and requires a deeper understanding of the subject matter. Where an ACT question might give a binomial equation and ask a student to find the area under the curve, the same question on the SAT would present a trinomial in place of the simpler binomial. The SAT also has 13 grid-in questions, where the ACT has only multiple choice, with no grid-ins. Further, it’s worth noting that the prospective SAT student would be slowed even further by the lack of a calculator; a third of the SAT’s math section is calculator-prohibited.The science section on the ACT may initially appear daunting, but it doesn’t require any prior knowledge. In the science section, an excerpt from a scientific report is published, along with a few accompanying graphs. All the information needed to answer the questions are contained within the article. It can essentially be thought of as a glorified English section.While the siren call of the SAT’s extra time may be tempting, it is important to keep in mind that the questions require a disproportionate amount of work to complete and are generally much more complex to answer. In contrast, the ACT has fewer, simpler questions, and is, all things considered, the easier test to score well on.