Two years ago, when College Board announced that the new Digital SAT would abandon dreaded long-passage reading comprehension questions in favor of a shorter, quicker, mixed verbal section, thousands of high school sophomores and juniors breathed a collective sigh of relief. Six paragraph science passages, plot-free fictional excerpts, and paired historical texts with flowery opaque language would all be retired with few lamenting their absence from the new exam. After all, these new passages were going to be easy! One and done! How could it possibly be difficult to guess the main idea of a five-line passage?
Posts by Steve Markofsky:
ACT Science: Extracting Signals Through Noise to Improve Your Score
“Ever thought about taking the ACT?”
SAT/ACT English: A Common Language
As the ACT has come into its own over the past 10-20 years as a fully recognized college admissions test alongside the SAT, students increasingly weigh both of these exams to assess which one may be better suited for them, sometimes opting for both. Preferences (and rumors) abound, of course: “There are too many trick questions on the SAT math!” or “I'd take the ACT, but the science section is a deal-breaker!” While these sentiments may (or may not) be true, depending on the student, what's certainly true is that they contribute heavily towards apprehension over which test to take! There is, however, one section that is nearly identical on each test, and offers a way to kill two birds with one stone in your college admission exam prep. That's the grammar/rhetoric section, referred to as the “English” section in the ACT, and the “Writing and Language” section on the SAT. CollegeXpress offers an in-depth analysis of the similarities and differences between the two tests.