Let’s play a guessing game, everybody. Your job is to try and guess the thing I’m describing. Here are the clues: it makes junior year more unbearable than it already is, it requires you to wake up at an ungodly hour of SATURDAY morning, and you need to take it in order to get into college and not end up a hobo for the rest of your life, or at least, that’s what everyone says.
For all the juniors and seniors out there, I think you know what dreaded three-letter word I’m thinking of. Yup, you got it, the ACT.
So what exactly is the ACT? The ACT is a national college admissions examination that consists of subject area tests in English, Math, Reading, and Science. It’s also the most torturous thing you could ever subject yourself to during your high school years.
So why exactly do we take the ACT? I mean, is the ACT even an accurate representation of intelligence? I really don’t think it is, and here’s why…
1. The ACT cannot conform to your physical or mental state during the time at which you take it. Meaning, you could be really sick when you take it, or you could be really hungry, or you could just be having a bad day. And let’s face it, you’re already in a bad mood if you have to wake up at 6:30 in the morning on Saturday to take an unbelievably long standardized test.
2. The ACT is a multiple choice test, meaning you could guess yourself to a great score without knowing anything at all. Guessing and getting things right is definitely NOT a sign of intelligence.
3. In the end, not everyone is built for these kinds of tests. Students are skilled at different things, and just because you aren’t the greatest test taker doesn’t mean you’re unintelligent.
So basically, I’m trying to make the point that you shouldn’t be discouraged or disappointed if you don’t get the score you want on the ACT. The fact remains that colleges look for a lot more qualities than just your ACT score. Getting that elusive number on one test isn’t going to magically get you into your dream school. I personally believe that students shouldn’t have to take the ACT at all. It’s a waste of our time and attention.
Adam Rubinberg • Oct 11, 2013 at 12:27 am
Though I agree with the overall message of this article, I feel that the first two reasons stated are already taken into consideration by the creators of the test.
First, although it is true that your physical and mental state have a large effect on your score, you can take the test as many times as you sign up for it, which means that even if you have a bad day the first time you take the test, you can still try again. At some point, everyone will have had at least one test day where everything goes well.
Second, though the ACT is multiple choice, someone who randomly guesses for the entire test will almost always only have 20-30% of the questions right (15-25% for math). Since you would have a 1 in 4 chance (1 in 5 for math) for every question, the odds of guessing the correct answer for at least half of the questions on the math test alone is 930,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. If you can narrow each problem down to two answers, then, assuming you always keep the right answer, you improve your odds to 1,073,741,824 to 1. To get three quarters of the questions right when you can always narrow it down to 2, your odds are 35,184,372,088,832 to 1. For the entire test, if you can correctly narrow down every question to 2 choices, your odds of getting three quarters of the questions right by guessing from the remaining choices is 41,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1.