What's the point of the ACT?

So now that I'm a junior, I get to take the ACT. Whoopee.

Though the last word was meant as sarcasm, I honestly love taking tests. Freshman year, the morning of my Honors Biology Final, Mr. Allchurch said to me, "I bet you just love taking tests." And though I hadn't realized it until that point (and no, I didn't realize it just because of the fact that when a British man says something, you want to listen), I do. I really do. I told him, yeah, and "It's the only time when everyone shuts up!" Excessive talking at the wrong times irritates me, if you haven't figured that out yet. In addition to that, it seems to me like a break from normal work. On a normal day in Honors Bio, for example, I would take a good 2-3 pages of notes per day, perhaps more. I didn't date my Bio notes then, and now I wish I had. You do far less writing on a test than you do learning the information. And as another addition, I usually finish fairly quickly (although math tests take a little longer from time to time), and then I have a good hour or so to do "Katie things". This includes writing, drawing little one-line doodles that look like something off a Rorschach inkblot test, playing music in my head, or telling myself stories. With the exception of writing, as it is forbidden, I do these things when I finish with a particular section of the ACT test.

Today we took a practice test. Personally, I would have rather been in my classes. We were given the choice not to take it, but we were promised a movie in the theater afterwards and exemption from the remaining classes of the day if we took the test. I planned to use this time to finish up my AP Language homework and work on my novel some more. This never happened. (My school just seems to have problems following through on their claims, and they are so bad at scheduling I once suggested that they should schedule something 30 minutes before they wanted it to happen so that it would actually happen when they wanted it to.) So, yeah, I missed AP Music Theory and had to jump right to Spanish. Why hast thou forsaken me, O ye Pharisee of Probability? (Would you believe I just thought of that now?)

Testing is important. I get that. Each job has certain skills that are essential if that job is to be carried out. As an engineer, you need to know how to do math. As a statistician or a scientist or an accountant, you need to know how to read graphs. If you're going to write anything in your life, you need to know how to write it with the proper spelling and grammar. The person reading that report is going to need to know how to pick out the important bits and remember those. And the ACT does test those skills to an extent. But I don't think the test really works.

Last year, in the second semester of AP Biology, Mr. Allchurch put some articles on to my data stick (everyone else's, too, but they're not the ones writing this blog post, are they?), one of which was one about being a good science teacher, or something like that. I enjoyed reading it. It said that school is the only time in your life that you can't look something up if you don't know it. If you're a professional chemist, you don't need to memorize the atomic masses of every single element, or really even the order they come in on the periodic table. You're probably going to have one right there next to you. A biologist probably doesn't need the knowledge about what photosystem does what in his everyday work, and if he needs it, he can look it up. Just the other day, my science teacher didn't know the name of the Marianas Trench, the deepest trench in the ocean, off the top of her head. She looked it up. Everything is somewhere, and school is the only place where you can't go find it. Sure, it's great if you memorize the information, but people aren't textbooks. That's why we have textbooks. There are many more important things to keep in our heads, like what not to combine if you don't want something to explode.

And that's not even the big part of my objection. I understand that some students would just look up all the information even if there are some things they should know, like in Biology you need to know the structure of the cell, or the formula for photosynthesis/respiration. So I get why they wouldn't make all tests open-book. I don't think the test should be timed.

I hate the math portion of the ACT. I also hate the science portion, but I hate the math portion even more. It's 60 questions in 60 minutes. Anyone who does math for a living has way more than one minute to solve a problem, be it one as simple as a math teacher would have, as long as an accountant would have, or as complex as an engineer would have. You have as much time as you need in the real world of math. Timed tests should not exist. Some people can't work or think under that kind of pressure. That's the same reason why I seldom play timed games. When that ticking clock isn't there, I can come up with a solution to the game in a matter of seconds. But with that clock, the same solution will take me so much more time to come up with. It's the same thing with the math portion. I'm in trigonometry now and I find myself enjoying solving triangles. Today I saw a problem on the math portion that looked like it wanted me to solve the triangle. So I quickly got to work. I saw my angles-I was given two of them- and I subtracted their sum for 180, like I always do. Only then did I read the question and find that I did all that work for nothing. Attention spans are getting shorter and shorter now. This isn't just me. I'm not the only one with the potential to do that.

And the thing is, the test is barely even testing mathematical knowledge. It wants to know that you know the proper formula, sure, but I think what it's really testing is reaction to stress under pressure. I was under the impression that humans were against human experimentation. I'm cool with it, personally, just tell me that's what you're doing and I'll submit like a little bunny rabbit. So long as it's not "oh, we're testing this to see if it's lethal", but rather psychological testing. Fire away with that, because I love it. Also, some people already have bad reactions to math. I read an essay about it once, I think, a professional essay, that said that fear of numbers was a legitimate thing. (I don't think you can have mathematical dyslexia, as I once had someone at school tell me they had, but certainly all the numbers can get you discombobulated.) Some people just aren't math people. And that's cool. I'm not a dancer. My friend "A" is not a singer. My friend "K" struggles with academia. Everyone's good at something and bad at something else. And you can teach people who are bad at math the formulas and all the everything they'll need (and you did read that right), but you can't teach them to be good at math. It's not going to happen. So certainly if we're going to have a test that tests everything, it should have math on it, but it shouldn't be timed. That just makes things worse. And I understand that we can't have people taking the test for the whole day. But that doesn't mean we can't have them stop for meal breaks or come back in the morning, and they can be restricted from answering any questions they answered before the break to prevent cheating.

And here's why I hate the science portion. It bears little relevance to science itself, and that upsets me. I get that it's all about reading graphs. But I keep getting this question about the threshold of hearing versus the threshold of pain. I keep looking at this graph, and I keep reading the explanation of the study they mention at the beginning, but I can't answer the questions. Maybe I want to understand this graph more. I know I do, and I'm incapable of it when I've only got 5 minutes and I'm left to my own devices. My desire for understanding could be preventing me from focusing on actually answering the question. But the first question is usually about finches. This question is the last one. The finch question is an easy one. I've answered it a dozen times in Biology class alone. I look at this graph about hearing and pain and the first thing I think is airplanes. And then I'm kind of stuck on that. I barely even tried answering those questions this time.

Clearly the ACT is in need of some serious reform. As far as tests go, I don't think it's been structured very well. I want to understand why they made it this way. Because I don't see the point of it. I don't see any purpose beyond college and the fact that schools make you take it for taking this test, for spending over 3 hours of my day doing something that I will barely remember later on. I'll remember the rest of high school. I'll hardly remember any of this.