February 20th marked a milestone for the juniors of Smoky Hill High School. It was the day of the ACT test.

The ACT is a standardized test that juniors take to get a score that colleges can take and use to decide if a student is fit for their school. The test covers four major subjects,English, Math, Reading, and Science. Those subjects are then scored and compiled into an overall score from one to thirty six. The average score is a twenty. So how scary was it this year?

“I feel I did pretty good, there were no questions that I had a hard time answering,” says Smoky Hill, Junior Colby Powers. “If I didn’t know the answer I just took the best guess and I feel like I did pretty good.” When asked on what he thought the hardest section was he said: “I feel like it was math because it’s sixty minutes for sixty questions and the questions  requires you to solve this problem and finding the area and all that. It normally takes more than one minute to solve a question so my teacher said that we had five minutes left and I still had fifteen questions left so I just had to write down answers. So I feel like math was the hardest section.”

Another Junior that took part in the ACT test was Zekiel Haney who accompanies Colby Powers on the fact that math was the hardest section saying, “Well see the first half of the math part I felt good on, the second part though made no sense to me whatsoever. I feel like there’s this difficulty gap. I think so because there’s trig. It goes from algebra questions to trig to pre calc and I think because there is trig and pre calc, not every kid has learned that. There’s just somethings that you haven’t learned. More specifically any pre calc stuff.”

So if these two students feel like they did pretty good, are there any tips or tricks for students next year?’

“Time management. You don’t have to read the instructions of everything just go to the question and find the part in the article. It’ll save you so much time on the English section,” says Colby Powers. “Study for the math that you’re not in. If you’re in algebra 2, study trig and precalc and the science isn’t that hard it’s the same as the reading except just more numbers,” stated Zekiel Haney.

“To the Juniors of the future. Good luck,” says Zekiel Haney