Donna Cox
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QUESTION: SAT and ACT: What's the difference? Which is better for my child?
The SAT Reasoning Test consists of 10 sections, one of which is experimental (at CTG, we call this the "guinea pig" section), three of which are Writing sections, three Math, and three Critical Reading. A question answered correctly will give the student one raw point, regardless of the difficulty level of the question; a question answered incorrectly will subtract one-fourth of a raw point from the student's score; and a question that is skipped has no effect on the score. It is CTG's recommendation that students guess as few times as possible; we feel that a skip trumps a guess just about every time. The first section is always the essay, which is one of the Writing sections; your child will have 25 minutes to write an essay that answers a question based on a prompt in the test booklet. The last section is also a Writing section; it is 10 minutes long and contains 14 Sentence Improvement questions. Somewhere in the middle is the third Writing section; this is 25 minutes long and consists of 35 questions, eleven of which are Sentence Improvements, eighteen of which are Identifying Sentence Errors, and six of which are Paragraph Improvements. The Writing sections test your child's knowledge of the rules of English grammar and sentence structure. The Math sections contain questions in the areas of Algebra, Geometry, number sense and data analysis. There are three sections: one has 16 multiple-choice questions, another has 20 multiple-choice questions, and the third has 8 multiple-choice and 10 "grid-in" questions. There is no Trig on the SAT Math; your child should be familiar with all the concepts on the SAT Math if (s)he has had Algebra I and II and Geometry at the Honors level. CTG gives all our students a heads-up lesson on concepts that may not have been covered in a College-Prep level Algebra II course so that they are prepared for those questions whether they have studied them in their regular course work or not. The Critical Reading portion of the SAT tests the students' vocabulary and reading comprehension. Vocabulary testing (19 questions total) comes in the form of "fill in the blank(s) with the appropriate word from the five choices given," and reading comprehension (48 questions total) is presented as multiple-choice questions on reading passages from as short as one paragraph to as long as two full columns. The long passages, of which there are generally four, cover four types of reading: fiction, arts/humanities, social studies, and natural science. The ACT test consists of 4 sections: English (grammar and rhetoric), Math, Reading, and Science, in that order. It is a fairly straightforward test, unlike the SAT which tends to be rather more sneaky and more "out of the box." The worst thing about the ACT is that it has a lot of questions to be answered in a fairly short time. But on the plus side, there is no penalty for guessing, so our advice is to pick a "guess" answer (for instance, "C") and use that answer every time you encounter a question you can't handle. The English portion of the ACT resembles the Paragraph Improvement section of the SAT in that both ask questions concerning the correctness of the grammar and rhetoric in an essay. The Math section of the ACT covers more territory - Trig and other pre-calc topics are fair game - but it is much more straightforward than the SAT Math, which tends to have a little bitty "land mine" in every question. The Reading section of the ACT is exactly like the four long passages of the SAT Critical Reading, but the questions are generally more factual, less interpretive, and therefore, some would argue, easier. The Science portion of the ACT deals with interpreting scientific information presented in chart, graph and experimental results format; it requires very little formal science knowledge, but the better a student is at science, the easier this section will be for him or her.
CTG advises all our students to take both the SAT and the ACT tests. Now (beginning with the class of 2010, this year's Juniors) that both the SAT and the ACT offer score choice and students can decide which of possibly several sets of SAT and/or ACT scores to send to the colleges, there is no down side to taking both. Students who do well on the SAT usually do as well or even better on the ACT, so they have two ways to shine on their college apps. Students for whom the SAT's "out of the box" characteristic is just a bit much to handle very often do better on the ACT, so they can choose to send just their best ACT scores. Every college in the country will accept either SAT or ACT scores.
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