As part of maintaining expertise and gaining insight into what our students experience, I went to a local high school and took an official ACT on October 28. In this post, I’d like to share some thoughts about the experience.
Some Personal Notes on the Experience: What It Feels Like to Take the ACT!
Right out of the gate, let’s address the elephant in the room: I’m a large adult man with a full beard and very obviously not a high school student. Pretty much everyone looked at me funny; there were some outright stares and whispers. Whenever I glanced around, I’d catch people side-eyeing me suspiciously. During the break, one of the other test-takers was brave enough to ask me why I was there taking the test. As it turned out, he also was not a high schooler; he was finishing a tour of duty in the Air Force and taking the ACT as part of getting ready to go to college with G.I. Bill funding. I think I even made the test proctor uncomfortable. Needless to say, feeling like everyone was watching me made me even more nervous, and it took some effort to tune it out and focus on the test.
The next most memorable part of the experience was my failure to account for the combination of the tea I had had that morning and how long we had to wait before the first break. The first two sections (English and Math) take 1 hour and 45 minutes together, and the first break isn’t until both are complete. But there was the added time of driving there, waiting in line to present my ticket and find out what room I’d be in, and then waiting for the proctor to make sure everyone was there, pass out tests, and read all of the initial instructions. To be blunt, I came very close to wetting myself; I practically sprinted to the restroom at the break!
Both of these are aspects of what we broadly call “the intangibles” of test-taking. In preparing for a test like this, it is important to master content (underlying math formulas, rules of grammar, etc.). At Reason Test Prep, we place even greater emphasis on training in effective strategies: time management and global approach to standardized tests as well as more refined strategies optimized for particular sections and question types. But there is a third important factor: the intangibles.
The Intangible Factors that Determine Success on a Test Like the ACT or SAT
To a considerable extent, this revolves around managing one’s internal state, both before and during the actual test. This includes getting a good night’s sleep beforehand, having a balanced meal that will fuel sustained concentration (the human brain is a surprisingly energy-hungry organ; a four-hour marathon of maximum mental effort burns a lot of calories), and being properly hydrated (and, if you choose, caffeinated). Obviously, there’s another side to that coin: too heavy a meal too soon beforehand may leave you feeling sluggish; too much hydration can make you uncomfortable while waiting for the break or the end of the test; too much caffeine may leave you too jittery to focus and think carefully.
Beyond the physiological considerations, there are important mental intangibles. These include, first of all, maintaining an appropriate level of stress. A little stress is actually a good thing, leading to improved alertness and performance. Too little stress and you might “check out”, breezing carelessly through difficult questions that require real caution, or decide that a reading passage is too boring and not read it carefully, and so on. But too much stress can make you crash or panic on a test. And during the test itself, it’s important to keep an eye on yourself and avoid getting cocky and not spending the time to really work out what seems like an easy problem. On the other hand, it’s also crucial to avoid getting stuck and spending too much time on a question you’re not likely to get right anyway, or getting so discouraged by difficult problems or not finishing a section in time that you give up on the test entirely.
A tip: if you tend to get too nervous to function effectively on a test (or before public speaking, or an interview), try doing a brief burst of intense physical activity that raises your heart rate — a few dozen jumping jacks, running in place for a minute, that sort of thing. The theory here is that your fight-or-flight response can be “tricked” into thinking that your body has just experienced whatever stressful event the body was preparing itself for. I do this all the time and find that it really helps!
Taking the ACT: Content and Strategy
I usually find the English section to be the easiest portion of the test. But I’ll admit, there was one question that I went back and forth on, erasing and changing my answer two or three times. It was a sentence correction question describing a researcher who did a lot of fieldwork on indigenous cultures, and it connected the themes she saw with her own traditional ethnic roots. At the relevant blank, I really liked the option of “still” as a connector; I felt there was a contrast and connection to the past that made it appropriate. But the same blank had an option of “however”; I decided that this was too similar to “still” in context, and they both had to be wrong. This is an example of what we describe as the Principle of No Ambiguity: if there are two essentially equivalent answer choices, they’re almost certainly both wrong. (After getting my test results back, I was pleased to find out that I made the right move.)
The Math section of the ACT is where I generally feel most comfortable (I have a degree in math). The ACT Math section is broader in scope than the SAT Math section, testing a wider array of mathematical topics. It also lends itself more readily to strategic approaches, whereas the SAT tends to be more straight math. Although I went slowly and carefully (I know myself well enough to know that I’m rarely challenged by the conceptual content, but I have a tendency to go fast and make sloppy mistakes, especially with negative signs), I got through all the questions with plenty of time to spare. Rather than sitting back smugly and being pleased with myself (as a high schooler, I’m ashamed to admit I did exactly that when I took the ACT), I used all of the available time to double-check my answers, trying alternative ways of solving any problems I felt at all uncertain about.
The Reading section, in retrospect, was sort of a blur. It’s the first of the two 35-minute sections, each with 40 questions, that come after the break in the middle of the test. While timing doesn’t feel quite as tight here as on the Science section, it’s important to keep an eye on the time and know where you are relative to where you should be in progressing through the questions. Yet again, the very same strategies I teach to students helped me on questions that might otherwise have given me pause. For example, one of the things we point out is that, all else equal, answers that align with the overall point of the passage tend to be right, even on questions that aren’t about the main idea of the passage. Reading with an eye to the author’s purpose and paying special attention to the beginning and end of the passage as a whole as well as the beginning and end of individual paragraphs all made this section feel easier.
The section I was most worried about was the Science section. In the three practice tests I had taken on my own in the weeks leading up to the test, I had gotten everything right twice… but then missed two on the very most recent Science section (one genuine careless error and one that I missed because I ran out of time). In all cases, timing was tight; I was finishing with no more than 5 minutes left of the 35 allotted for that section. In the official test I took on October 28, I did manage to complete all the questions in time, with only 3 or 4 minutes left to double-check the questions I had marked and moved on from before getting myself to 100% certainty. In an upcoming blog post, I’ll expand on the questions-first approach that I used and recommend for this section, and on the reasoning behind it.
Results and Conclusions
To be honest, I was a little disappointed at the outcome when I received my score report. On the one hand, I did manage a composite score of 36. I got a 36 on each of the English, Math, and Reading sections, missing no questions at all in the first two. But much to my frustration, I ended up with a 34 on the Science section. I had put a lot of time and thought into preparing for this section in particular, trying out different approaches to overcome the brutal time crunch. I know I can do this section without missing anything — I’ve done it on several practice tests — and it’s upsetting when so much hard work and potential doesn’t get the desired results on the first go.
This brings me to the last and most important point. No matter how well you prepare – how thoroughly you’ve mastered the content, practiced the strategies, and fine-tuned your timing — it’s one brief event, and sometimes stuff happens! I’m not discouraged by falling a little flat on one section; if anything, I’m eager to sharpen my skills further and have another crack at it. It’s important that students understand this and prepare for taking the test multiple times to get the best score they can. The ACT and SAT don’t deliver a once-and-for-all measure of your inherent skill; you can and will get better with training, practice, and
expert help.