ACT time limit errors too?? Say it ain't so!

Among hundreds of high school students around me, I took the ACT exam last Saturday, June 13. In order to live up to the Main Line Test Prep slogan of “We don’t just teach the tests. We take them too!”, I try to take the SAT and ACT once a year. I took the SAT on June 6 and reported on that too.

On the heels of a major SAT blunder, there were reports of isolated ACT timing issues. http://patch.com/pennsylvania/ardmore/june-6-sat-will-count-2-sections-omitted-free-re-take-available-october

One of my students indicated a proctor was confused on certain procedures. Consequently, she started the ACT about an hour late. Teenage test takers are nervous enough as it is. Delaying the test only adds to that anxiety.

Personally, I witnessed a major timing error. My ACT proctor messed up the time limit on the reading section. She wrote a starting time of 10:26, and a finishing time of 11:01. She did this despite the fact that we actually started at 10:36 and should have had until 11:11. This would cost the classroom full of students 10 minutes.

I had to raise my hand and silently mime the problem to get the proctor’s attention. After about a minute of wasting my scarce testing minutes, she caught on and fixed the mistake. Not only was I wasting time that I needed to answer all the questions, I was distracting students in the class room to make sure they weren’t unfarily penalized 10 minutes.

So, what would have happened if I weren’t in there? Sadly, proctor timekeeping is all too often an issue. Even worse, there is usually no real recourse for such mistakes.

-Steve Odabashian (Steve has been tutoring standardized tests including the SAT and ACT for over 15 years. He runs Main Line Test Prep where he not only teaches the tests, but takes them too! In the last 2 years, Steve has posted super scores of 2400 on the SAT and 35 on the ACT. Steve is a local education expert for Patch in several communities in the area.)