The Big Tests: Considering the ACT(American College Test)

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The ACT is the other standardized college admissions exam. It is more widely used in the Midwest and South than the SAT, and is actually required of all high school students in Illinois and Colorado. Unlike the SAT, which began as the work of a Princeton psychologist in the mid-1920s, the American College Testing Program began in 1959 through the efforts of a University of Iowa statistician who had worked on a statewide testing program for Iowa high school students. The ACT used a different philosophy—it was closely tied to specific instructional goals, while the SAT was more abstract and contained only verbal and mathematical sections. Virtually all colleges in the United States that require a student to take a standardized admission test now accept either the SAT or the ACT, although historically the SAT has been the most widely used test on the East and West coasts and at selective colleges everywhere. You should know how the tests differ, so you can judge whether to take one or the other, or maybe even both. High school sophomores at many schools can take a preliminary version of the ACT known as PLAN.

                                                                                                                                                                      SAT- ACT Score Comparisons 

The ACT has traditionally been known as more content-oriented than the SAT. The ACT claims that its questions are tied more to what a student has learned in school in Grades 7 through 12 than to critical thinking and problem solving in general. This is true to an extent, especially in the math section, where you need to know some trigonometry, but it can also be overstated. The ACT focuses on four areas—English, math, reading, and science reasoning. This last section, for example, requires no knowledge of science itself, only a sense of how a scientist reasons inductively from data to general conclusions.

The ACT consists of four sections corresponding to these four areas. Actual testing time is about three hours (with breaks it takes about three and a half hours), and all questions are multiple choice. Results are reported as a composite score as well as scores on each of the four sections, with each part, as well as the composite, scored on a scale from 1 to 36. The ACT also has an optional essay that is similar to that found on the SAT. Scored separately from the ACT itself, the essay is administered at the end of the ACT test and adds an additional thirty minutes of testing time. The more selective colleges tend to require it, but not all do, so you don’t have to do it unless one of your colleges requires it. The national average composite score for the ACT is around 21, just as the average SAT score (old version) is about 1000.

Which Test Should You Take?

One big advantage of the ACT is that some colleges requiring SAT Subject Tests will accept the ACT in lieu of both the SAT and the SAT Subject Tests.

Another popular feature of the ACT compared to the SAT is that it doesn’t penalize the student for wrong answers, as the SAT does. This encourages guessing, but, contrary to popular understanding, it doesn’t make the test any easier because every student gets the same benefit, and the scores are scaled relative to each other, not on an absolute scale. The ACT is also designed to be harder to finish in the allotted time.

Some people think that the ACT is more student-friendly, down to earth, or just easier than the SAT. These beliefs have led to the growing popularity of the ACT and its acceptance by colleges. But in the end, they are both just tests, and most students who take both tests do about the same on each of them. There is no good research that shows that a certain kind of student (by gender, academic interests, or socioeconomic background) tends to do better on one. Of course, some actually do score better on one than the other, but you can’t know in advance if you will be among them.  It is a good idea to take whichever test appeals to you more, see how you do, and if you don’t do as well as you think you should, consider taking the other to see if something in the style of the test is holding you back. Of course, you do not have to actually take the tests to compare them—practice tests can serve the same purpose. If you decide to take the ACT, check to see if your schools require the ACT writing test as well. You need to register for that at the same time—it is not included automatically, as is the essay with the SAT. Overall, though, it is adviced to keep all of this in perspective and not putting more emphasis on the whole testing enterprise than is called for.

Information about the ACT, as well as online registration, is available on the ACT Web site, www.act.org, and test prep books and online courses are widely available. The test is administered six times a year—in September, October, December, February, April, and June—and students can register online using a credit card just as they can for the SAT. The test currently costs $31, or $46 with the writing test. As with the SAT, fee waivers for the ACT are available through high school counseling offices.