Rethinking the SAT and ACT

By: Kaitlyn W I remember taking the ACT the summer before my senior year of high school. I remember being nervous and not ready to take it. I thought that I wasn’t prepared enough to take the ACT yet, but at least I tried. I just took the ACT test and not the SAT because I thought I would not do well on the SAT. I was so nervous before staring the test and when I started taking the test I was even more nervous. Taking timed tests was never an easy thing for me to do. During a break in the middle of the four tests, I was talking to a friend and she said she was not finishing her tests because she didn’t have enough time. I was thinking the same thing. The ACT test times were not long enough to be. It seemed like the people over the test told us to start and five minutes later they were saying time is up. After I finished the test and I was on my way home, I just felt defeated and was being hard on myself because most of the things on the test I did not know. I thought the math and science part were the hardest for me because I am not very good in those subjects anyway. My scores were not that great and I remember crying because I was not happy with myself. Having such low ACT scores, it made me have to take fundamental math and English classes in college. I know that I am a good English student and I should not have been in fundamental English class because everything we did in the class I already knew. Now math is another question, I know I am terrible in math and I think being in fundamental math is helping me a lot to become better in my math skills. I don’t think college admission tests should be abolished because they help see where students are at. I do agree with the article “A New SAT Aims to Realign with Schoolwork,” by Tamar Lewin saying that low income students will be given free waivers allowing them to apply to four colleges of their choices. I think that having students pay for applications is crazy. I think why we should have to pay for college applications that we might not even get into the college that we applied for. When I was taking the ACT, I did not know many things that were on it because we never went over them in high school. They need to either focus more in school about the ACT or have the ACT focus more on what students have learned.