FROM the moment I gave birth, I began to gird myself for the difficult questions that tiny, nosy people might one day ask. I prepared answers worthy of a White House press secretary to address such subjects as teenage sex (“never heard of it”) and drug use (“mild decongestants only”).
So I was ready when my daughter, a junior, cornered me in the kitchen the other day.
“Mom, can I ask you a question?” she asked.
“Sure, anything,” I lied.
She had heard from her teachers that some students score higher on the ACT and others on the SAT, and so she was wondering how I had decided which test to take, and did I think she should follow the same strategy.
I considered possible answers. The last time I was exposed to the horror of standardized testing was in 1979, when I vaguely remember rolling out of bed early one Saturday to frantically root around for two No. 2 pencils to take to a test center, where I nodded off during a particularly boring passage in the reading section.
“Wouldn’t you rather hear about my underage drinking?” I asked.
A generation ago, taking a standardized test was a no-brainer: it was mainly a matter of geography. In the Midwest, students took the ACT. If you lived on the coasts — or were applying to a highly selective college or university there — you took the SAT.
Continue reading the main storyNow, with some Ivy League schools rejecting nine of 10 qualified candidates, applicants are looking for any edge to improve their chances. Many, particularly those in traditional SAT territory, are taking both tests and submitting the higher score or both scores. In the last five years, the number of ACT takers on the East Coast has risen 66 percent, and on the West Coast 46 percent, according to ACT Inc.
But not everybody has the time or money to prepare for both tests. And the truth is, most probably don’t need to. While the tests have distinct personalities — the ACT is curriculum-based, while the SAT is aimed more at general reasoning and problem-solving skills — spokesmen for both say their formats favor only one type of student: the one with a good grasp of material taught in rigorous high school courses.
Similarly, colleges swear they don’t prefer one over the other. “Since it’s a choice you can make, it has the feeling of being a significant choice, fraught with implication, but I don’t think it does matter,” says Marlyn McGrath-Lewis, director of admissions at Harvard College. “Either is fine with us, and we don’t have a feeling that either favors students with any particular profile.”
Still, some college counselors believe otherwise. In the absence of quantitative studies, they suggest asking yourself a few questions.
1. Which format feels right?
You can take predictive tests (the PSAT and PLAN) sophomore year and extrapolate scores you’re likely to get on the SAT and ACT. The practice tests cover much the same material as their respective cousins, which they imitate in style and content.
Experts recommend that if your school gives both, take both. If not, test prep companies offer free full-length practice tests for the ACT and SAT online (at Princetonreview.com, Petersons .com and Ivybound.net).
“Take each test in as realistic conditions as possible, with no distractions, timing yourself,” says Scott Johns, a Peterson’s product manager. “Your score is a benchmark, but also think about how you felt about taking each test. Did you understand the format? Did one experience cause more stress than the other?”
2. How long can you sit without fidgeting?
If you have a short attention span and difficulty maintaining focus, the ACT may be for you, says Marybeth Kravets, a college counselor in suburban Chicago and the “K” in the K & W college guides for students with special needs. The ACT lasts two hours, 55 minutes (plus 30 minutes with the optional writing test). The SAT lasts three hours, 45 minutes.
Similarly, counselors say that students with learning disabilities that make it difficult to process information may do better on the ACT. “That’s because the ACT questions are more knowledge-based and straightforward,” says Scott White, director of guidance at Montclair High School in New Jersey. “The SAT is more nuanced, puzzlelike, trickier.”
Both cover English and math, but there are notable variations in content. For instance, in measuring verbal skills, the SAT focuses on vocabulary whereas the ACT concentrates on grammar, punctuation and syntax. And if you want to avoid science and trigonometry, stick with the SAT, which has neither.
3. Overachiever or underachiever?
College counselors say they see two groups of students, with distinctly different approaches to learning, who may score markedly higher on one test or the other.
“The bright underachievers who are bored and get through school using one quarter of their brains will do better on the SAT, because you just need good reasoning skills for that,” says Mr. White. “And the overachievers, I don’t want to call them grinds, but they’re the ones who get the highest grades in the toughest classes because they work really hard, will do better on the ACT.”
Mr. White’s theory was echoed by several counselors who responded to a comment he posted in August on the Web site of the National Association for College Admissions Counseling. Cigus Vanni, a school counselor at Cherry Hill High School West in New Jersey, was one who agreed. In a phone interview, he elaborated on the “grinds”: “There’s a cluster in the middle — the kids who would be average to above-average types of kids, the subgroup who don’t have the intellectual flash of the really tippy-top kids but who work really hard in school, and these are the kids who do better on the ACT. They are compliant with school, willing to go the extra mile, ask the extra question, do their homework. And for them, the ACT is much more like just another school-based test than the SAT is.”
In his experience, he says, differences in scores are not consequential for students at either end of the test-taking spectrum. “The great test takers are great test takers, no matter what instrument they’re playing. And the kids at the other end, who consistently get 350s on the SATs or 11s on the ACTs, they’re not going to do better no matter which test they take.”
4. Girl or boy?
The observation has been made that boys surpass girls on standardized tests. But the ACT gender gap has narrowed. Boys from the class of 2007 scored 21.2 on average, with girls just behind at 21 (the equivalent of 1500 on the SAT, according to the Princeton Review formula).
But boys as a group do better on the SAT, according to data published by both testing companies: 1037 for the class of 2007, compared with 1001 for girls.
That doesn’t mean that every boy should take the SAT and every girl the ACT. But, says John Katzman, chief executive of the Princeton Review, “Girls tend to fit pretty well into the group of high achievers, who get good grades and do well in school, who also do well on the ACT.”
He adds: “I sometimes give the advice that if you were to flip a coin, just go with the SAT if you’re a boy and the ACT if you’re a girl, in part for that reason.”
The test makers’ statistics also indicate that members of minority groups score better across the board on the SAT than on the ACT. But that can be explained, Mr. Katzman says: Top students in all ethnic groups tend to take the SAT, while some Midwestern states require all juniors to take the ACT, thus lowering the mean.
5. Which do you think you’ll do better on?
You’ll probably live up to those expectations — especially if you are a girl or a member of a minority group. The reason is a phenomenon called “stereotype threat,” identified more than a decade ago by Claude M. Steele and Joshua Aronson after they discovered that individual test scores changed with the test taker’s sense of confidence.
“Women and minorities feel stereotypes in our society — that they don’t have the same innate academic abilities as men and Caucasians,” says Professor Steele, director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. “So if they are taking a test that they have been told is difficult and then they experience frustration in the middle of it, that makes the stereotype relevant to them and they perform dramatically worse.” But, he says, if you believe you will do well on a particular test, your performance is less likely to be impaired by difficult problems.
I told my own daughter, a good test taker who possesses what appears to me to be a magically endless supply of freshly sharpened pencils, that I would recommend either test for her, so long as she follows my final bit of parental advice.
“The real trick,” I said, “is to stay awake.”
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