<p>Hello, i'm a rising junior, and i am looking to be recruited to run at some of the ivies (yale or dartmouth probably). i have a 4.0 uw gpa in honors classes and ive been prepping for the SAT, but scored poorly on practice CR and writing sections i took at home.(580,550) this has gotten me pretty sad/irritated and has somewhat lowered my confidence :(
Maybe the ACT is the test for me? however i am not a a very quick tester, and i hear that would be a problem on the ACT. Any help with my situation, or advice is appreciated. (my goal is a 30 or 31+) what do you think?</p>
<p>IMHO the ACT tends to favor good, fast readers. In addition, students who have a large CR / M discrepency in which one of their scores falls below the 25th percentile of their preferred college’s range may want to take the ACT where only the composite score is looked at. Our students who are better langauge based subjects (reading / writing) as oppossed to math have typically done better on the ACT, although I can find no statistical studies to back this up, I think it may be because only 25% of the ACT composite score is based on Math, whereas the SAT (most colleges are still only looking at the CR + M) is 50% math.</p>
<p>it definitely seem like a test i would score better on, due to the 25% math (which is not my strong point) and more of a focus on reading and writing etc. and yes, hopefully the composite can somewhat “cover up” a weaker secion (which most likely will be math), but we’ll see. i have yet to take a practice ACT test. Any other insight about my situation or advice would be great.</p>
<p>ACT definitely favors fast readers and processors. Time is the most common issue with the ACT as it tests to see how well you know what you have learned. (The better you know it, the faster you should be able to solve problems)</p>
<p>For the Ivies, you need to clear 32 if you are unhooked. A 30/31 won’t be too competitive.</p>
<p>Yes the ACT is all about speed. But at the same time, the problems/questions are much more straightforward. The SAT requires mental manipulation to simplify difficult math problems before you solve – you see it or you don’t. The SAT also requires you to know arcane rules to solve 'if a train leaves Chicago going east…</p>
<p>Break up the ACT passages into small segments and practice against a timer – 10 questions in say, 8 minutes. You can and will get faster.</p>
<p>I would at least try an ACT practice test and see how you do. There is one on actstudent.org called “preparing for the act 2011-2012”. Maybe try that one and see how you do compared to the SAT.</p>
<p>People who do well on the ACT are generally fast readers. Just try a practice test and see how you do.</p>
<p>It clicks with the dumb ones.</p>
<p>so, colleges just see your composite, and your essay score? not the subsection scores? and does the ACT math section really test just “academic” math? and about how many questions wrong per section would lead to about a 31? and last question (sorry) if it can be answered, does the “no penalty” for wrong answers help kids overall scores significantly or somewhat significantly?
if anyone can help with these questions that would be great</p>
<p>@whiteboyNJ123- That was extremely RUDE!!! People like you make me sick.</p>
<p>teddy:</p>
<p>colleges receive all subscores. Some look at the individual scores and some do not. A few colleges even superscore the ACT. ACT math is a ‘higher’ level than SAT in that it includes 4 trig problems, which is generally precalc. (SAT math only goes up through Alg II.)</p>
<p>Each ACT test differs in rigor, so the scaling changes by +/-1. In general, to score a 32 in math, you need to get ~54 correct out of 60, or 70 out of 75 in English. For a 32 in science, you can miss only ~3 out of 40.</p>
<p>jeez, that seems like a very small number you are allowed to miss… but then again the questions are very straight forward right?.. what do you think? becuase on the SAT, missing a similar number would probably yeild a higher score… at least it seems that way.
Any other advice or insight about the ACT and my situation is appreciated.</p>
<p>Yeah, the ACT is structured so that most of the questions you see on the test will be ones that test your general knowledge. So, there is reason to believe that there is correlation between your performance in school and your ACT score. However, there is a correlation between SAT scores and performance in school as well, but the correlation is a lot weaker. </p>
<p>Ex: a group of people at my school used about $5,000 each on SAT courses and they all ended up with scores between 2350-2400, but they were struggling with basic calculus and all the other classes that others found a piece of cake. They were students in the bottom 50% of the class and they outscored many who were in the top 1%. </p>
<p>However, this same group of people also took the ACT, and they got scores ranging from 25-33 (composite). </p>
<p>If you find that you ace classes at your school with relative ease (and the school isn’t grade-inflated beyond belief) and you don’t want to waste time studying for the SAT, I’d recommend the ACT. It’s what I did, and my score wasn’t terrible for the effort (which was basically nothing) I put into taking the test. I mean, sure I could have bumped up my score (34) to a 36, but I didn’t feel like taking any practice tests or studying at all.</p>
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<p>False. There are no such studies. The vast majority of students do equally well (or poor) on both tests. A small % do much better on one than the other. My S, for example, walked away with several math awards in HS, but literally bombed the ACT-m. ACT didn’t ‘click’ for him, but his SAT was good enough for an Ivy admission. OTOH, my D was just the opposite. ACT was much higher than SAT. Both kids were comparable in class rank, at a competitive HS (5% NM finalists).</p>
<p>Final tip: the so-called Science section is (nearly) all about speed-reading, so practice against a clock at home. The data presented in the passage holds 99% of the material needed to answer the questions. No science knowledge required.</p>
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<p>Sorry, I should have said that this was the case at my school. I thought it would be apparent with the examples I provided.</p>
<p>The ACT is good for the grinds who make straight A’s but don’t have the reasoning ability for the SAT.</p>
<p>^^Actually, not quite. The bulk of the ‘reasoning’ is in ACT’s science section. But if it were really true, why would HYP accept the ACT at all? Yale even accepts the ACT in lieu of subject tests.</p>
<p>Do the Ivies really want “grinds” who “don’t have…reasoning ability”? Does that make sense to you cellist?</p>