The acronym ACT stands for American College Testing and was first introduced late 1959. It is a standardized test, similar to the SAT Reasoning Test and was deliberately introduced to compete with the SAT as there were many opponents of the SAT test at the time.
The ACT has never attained the same popularity as the SAT, although in recent years many people and colleges are suggesting that the ACT is a more accurate measurement of a student's potential. The ACT is more popular in Mid-Western and Southern states whereas the SAT tends to be more popular down the eastern and western seaboards.
The purpose of the ACT is the same as the SAT. There is no standardized evaluation system in high schools; the curriculums can vary significantly and the grading systems also vary. This means that while the actual grade types are the same from one high school to the next, the marking system and examination content is different. So while the grades from on e high school are fine for comparing the students in the same high school, the grades don't really indicate much between high schools.
The ACT (and the SAT) are totally standardized which means it doesn't matter which high school a student is from, the ACT is the same and is marked the same. It enables colleges to fairly accurately work out whether a student is suited to the college and will achieve what they want to achieve.
Much of the ACT is multiple choice questions and one of the reason why the ACT is gaining in popularity is that there are no penalties for answering a multiple choice question incorrectly. If a student decides to have an educated guess at a question in the SAT and gets it wrong the students gets penalised. Repeat this guessing many times and your results deteriorate, even though you may be doing particularly well generally.
The ACT does not penalise wrong multiple choice answers. This means that once you have completed the examination and have some time left you can go back through the papers and check out multiple choice questions your didn't answer. You can try and work out an educated guess and is you get it wrong it doesn't matter.
There are four multiple choice tests; English, mathematics, reading and science reasoning. The score can be from 1 to 36 for each section.
English has 75 questions and lasts 45 minutes and deals specifically with sentence structure, paragraphs, the placing of commas and apostrophes etc. The math section lasts for 1 hour and has 60 questions while the reading section has 40 questions and a time limit of 35 minutes. It deals with reading comprehension with extracts taken from a variety of books and magazines. The science reasoning test lasts for 35 minutes and consists of 40 questions.
ACT results vary by year, but the pass rate has been improving for the last few years and there is a significant increase in the pass rate for those that retake the ACT.
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Written by Lawrence Reaves for SchoolTutoring Academy - http://www.schooltutoring.com - providing tutoring services online for students on all subjects including, Math, English and Science. In-depth tutoring for specialized courses such as chemistry, physics and biology are also available. Call 1-877-452-6669 to see how SchoolTutoring Academy can help.
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