Staff reporter Nicola Mayer breaks down the ACT and SAT

Nicola Mayer | Staff Reporter

If you’re a junior, standardized test season is upon you and you should be familiar with the SAT and ACT. If you’re a sophomore, while it may seem as if those are in the distant future, many people opt to start getting tutors and taking practice tests early on. When I started the process, I immediately jumped into the SAT since it was the test I was more familiar with. Obviously that wasn’t the biggest mistake of my life, but quite honestly I wasted a lot of time preparing for that test when I was better suited for the ACT. I ended up taking both tests, even though I should have just focused on one. Had I known the ACT was the better test for me, I wouldn’t have had to that unnecessary energy into preparing for the SAT.

The best piece of advice I can give you is, before you decide which test to start preparing for, take both and see which one comes more naturally to you. Sure, that might be awful taking two tests that you haven’t studied for, but if you do significantly better on one than the other, I think you found your calling.

Some basic facts to help you make your decision:

-The ACT is four longer sections (30 – 60 minutes)

-The ACT has a science section

-The ACT’s math section involves trig

-The ACT has no penalty for getting an answer wrong

-The ACT gives you 4 scores out of 36, an overall composite score and a separate writing score (if you choose to take the writing section)

-The SAT is 10 sections of varying length

-The SAT takes off ¼ point for a wrong answer

-The SAT gives you three scores out of 800

In general, the ACT asks questions that are harder, but in a more straightforward way. The ACT is good if you are good at time management and also can focus for a good amount of time. If it’s hard for you to jump around from topic to topic, the ACT will be an easier test for you to take. There are less transitions and you don’t have to focus on the same topic 3 different times during 3 different sections. Also if you are more of a math and science person, you are probably better suited for the ACT. Since the ACT asks trigonometry questions, your advanced math skills will be put to good use. Also while the science section doesn’t explicitly ask you facts about the human body or the periodic table, you will have to analyze data and compare different scientists answers to the same question.

If you tend to keep second guessing yourself, the SAT will not resonate with you. Since there are points taken off for wrong answers, it can be very stressful if you’re only 75% sure an answer is correct. Moreover the SAT questions tend to be written a bit more abstractly, yet the actual questions are more simple than ACT questions. So even if you understand a reading passage very well, the questions may trick you and that could cause a lot of issues. If you perform better in short amounts of time and managing long periods of time is not your forte, the SAT if for you. The longest sections are 25 minutes, so you’ll never have to be thinking about the same topic for too long.

Both the SAT and ACT add obvious stress to your workload, but if you can just focus on one or the other, hopefully a little bit of work will be taken off your plate. Either way, you should remember that neither test will haunt you for the rest of your life, nor will your score define you. Be prepared, work an appropriate amount and you’ll be just fine. Good luck!