We had the ACT yesterday. The room felt really cold — almost too cold to be in, like Antarctica. Was it really that cold, or was I just nervous about the test? I settled down in my seat along with the other 25 test takers, and the ACT officially began.

There were three tests in particular that had me thinking deeply, even after I got home. These challenging sections were math, writing, and science. The strange part about the three was that the math portion went too fast, but then the writing and science portions were super slow.

I didn’t like that at all. After all, this was my first ACT, and I thought I had prepared myself pretty well. Anything can happen when taking a test like this, right?

Out of the three tests that stuck to my brain like hard cement, math was first. I was confident about math for a couple of reasons. I am in an advanced math class. My strongest subject is math. The ACT math portion is spread from geometry and up. All of these reasons made me think that I was going to be okay. There were 60 math questions. When I thought my pacing was good, I checked the time and had 20-25 minutes to answer 25 questions. My pace was a question every minute, but once you reached the long questions that you had to write out, that one question per minute pace kind of just went down the drain. So, within the last five minutes, I had to guess on eight questions. I was a little disappointed about that, but these were educated guesses, and this was my first ACT. I didn’t really know what to expect.

Chemistry and writing were long tests. It felt like you were lying in
bed all night trying to sleep, constantly checking the time, only to see it had moved four minutes, not two hours. I finished the last chemistry question with 30 seconds to spare. My eyes were slowly starting to shut. Even the coldness in the room wasn’t enough to keep me awake. I also knew for a fact that this was one of the hardest subjects for me to understand.

Writing, however, took another step down the extremely long-time stairs. This was the final test on the ACT.

Everybody was eyeing the clock. The second the bell rang, Black Friday-like chaos was going to erupt, and everyone was going to sprint to their cars. It was really that bad.

I ended up writing a little over two pages in around 25 minutes. I reread my paper a few times over and made some simple mistake fixes. Once I finished, the rest of the time stretched on for eternity. Closing my eyes didn’t work. Playing with my calculator didn’t help. I just had to hopelessly sit there and not look around too much or else the teacher would think I’m cheating. I was just endlessly sitting there.

I expected the ACT to be long the first time, but I personally thought that this was one of the longest tests of my life. I will be taking this test a couple more times. I will need to prepare a little more and make sure I get even more sleep, because I thought seven hours was enough. Who knows, though — I could take this test again and do so much better than what I originally thought, but with the same, or even less preparation. That is what I hope. ‘Til next time.