The ACT is a standardized test that some colleges require students to take. The scores range from one to 36, 36 being the best. Students who take the ACT have to pay a fee, but every year students at Hickman are given the opportunity to take the ACT for free as juniors at Hickman. This year, juniors took the ACT on April 9.
Jameson Sparks, a junior who took the ACT this year, explained what taking the ACT looked like for him.
“They have a specified day where you go in and classes are all rearranged. So, for the first two blocks, it’s kind of extended lunch and all this stuff. You stay in one room and you go through [an] English, math, reading, and science portion,” Jameson said.
Max Strode, another junior, expressed his thoughts on the difficulty of the test.
“If you have the same skills for everything, they’re about the same difficulty across the board, but, it’s really gonna depend on how good you are at certain subjects,” Max said.
While Hickman may have provided students the opportunity to take the test, many students prepared for the test outside of school.
Max Strode outlined what prepared him for the test.
“I’m not really a full Hickman student; I take MACC classes. So I would say my MACC class has prepared me really well for this, especially my college English classes, my composition classes, definitely bumped my English score a lot I can already tell,” Max stated.
Some took practice into their own hands. There are many ways to prepare, especially online.
“I took a practice ACT about two weeks beforehand,” Jameson stated.
“I felt pretty prepared after taking the Pre-ACT last year,” Robert Johnson, another junior, stated.
Hickman no longer offers the Pre-ACT, so many students prepare on their own. However, Hickman is still a part of the ACT prep.
Students learn in biology how to classify the parts of cells which will help them on the test.
Jameson said, “A lot of the graph reading stuff really carried over.”
Other ways for students to prepare were offered in class.
Robert expressed that “going through classes to learn about what other stuff is on the ACT did help.”