Welcome to Your Life: ACT Style

The ACT is the most basic college acceptance test. Most everyone who has a hope to go to college has to go through the stress and hassle of taking this test. Why do we have to do this?
College is a competition. You have to fight for scholarships, classes, and special treatment. The better you prove yourself with your GPA, ACT scores, school activities, and service hours, the better chance you have to get into an elite college or to receive a good scholarship. These simple factors can affect us in our pockets for monetary issues, our jobs, and even our social lives. This leads me to believe that the ACT might play too big of a role in college acceptance. One single 3 hour exam can change your future forever. A couple mistakes can stop you from receiving a full ride to the college of your dreams to having to shell out every dime in your bank account to go to the community college down the street. That is just too great of a weight.
I think that either the ACT should be slightly modified or that its importance is slightly lowered. The first problem I see with the ACT is the time limit. As our class just took a practice ACT, we all (or most of us) saw the effect of being rushed while trying to answer everything correctly. You can’t answer them correctly. The ACT is catered to those who work fast. Most people cannot work fast. In school we are assigned homework which we have almost an endless amount of time to do. Our tests always have a reasonable limit where we can work on each problem with enough time. Why then, in one of the most important tests in our life, are we timed? The ACT should either raise the time limits or even get rid of the time limits completely. If you don’t know an answer, waiting an hour won’t help you realize it. In this way, we can all logically think about each question and all have a fair chance.
My second solution is to lower the standards of the ACT for colleges. All other requirements you have been working on for all four years you are in high school. Why should one standardized test take preference over four years of your life? This idea is ludicrous. I think that the college’s own pre-requisite tests should be used. For most advanced classes you will have a test to take to see if you have the knowledge to take the class. Why can’t colleges have these same tests for college applicants?
No matter what I say or how I say it, the ACT will probably always be a large part of college readiness. We can only learn to take the test with confidence, practice, and a little bit of luck. We can practice time management and take practice exams to prepare ourselves. We can even take the test several times to assure that you did your best. As we all are preparing to determine our lives, I wish all of us good luck.