Comparing the SAT and ACT
This year, I entered my junior year of high school. Almost everyone I told this to cringed just at the sound; in most high schools, it’s the real push year. Two things are on everyone’s minds: to get grades as high as possible, and to take standardized tests.
I’m a good student and put a lot of hard work into my study, so the first wasn’t necessarily foremost in my mind, because it was something that I was focusing on all the time. However, the issue of standardized tests concerned me. The SATs and the ACTs are SO important on the college application…but which one is valued more? My cousin, a high school college advisor, encouraged me to take both. He said that colleges can get a broader perspective on what kind of student you are if you give them as much testing information as possible. I heeded his advice and made the decision back in November to take both the SATs and the ACTs.
Before taking either test, I admit that I knew almost everything about the SATs and almost nothing about the ACTs. From what others told me, the SATs were “impossibly hard” and the ACTs much more reasonable. The SATs are what my (and most) high schools really focus on as far as college prep. We’d do practice problems for an hour and a half every week in both English and math classes for the entire year so that we’d be adequately prepared. On top of that, I took outside SAT math tutoring for 5 weeks, as the math instruction I’ve gotten in every school I’ve been in for the last 10 years has been pretty shaky. By the time I took the test, I was dissecting literary passages and solving algebra problems in my sleep. All the hard work paid off; my scores were much improved from every practice test I had taken up to that point.
The ACTs, on the other hand, were more of a mystery to me. Besides the math, English, reading and writing section (all of which were par for the course on standardized tests) there was also a science section. While I’ve taken science classes this year, admittedly, it wasn’t very in-depth. I had focused more on the humanities and artistic electives (I’m planning on going to film school and figured that abstract metaphysical theorems weren’t going to be as important in directing films as, say, photography.) The superficial Chemistry and very basic Biology I received in freshman and sophomore years didn’t help at all with the complex Physics and statistics present on the test. I immediately dismissed the idea that the ACTs were more
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