This past Tuesday, our sophomores and freshmen here at Burke took the preACT to prepare for their junior year ACT exam. The preACT is a nonprofit organization that has low stakes and is designed by ACT. It’s a slightly shorter test that is designed to help younger students prepare for the actual ACT coming up within their next year or two.

Aubrey Hemmer, a sophomore at Burke, stated that the subject she felt most nervous about during the exam was science.

“The way they word the problems is confusing; I don’t do well with those questions.” Hemmer said.

She did most of her preparation for the PreACT in class, with the practice questions we did to help prepare students for the exam.

“I felt I didn’t really know what I was supposed to study for the exam.” Hemmer added.

The amount of time you get per question seemed to be an issue within the students as well. One minute per question did not seem like enough time, and they ended up more focused on how much time they had rather than the question at hand.

“We have so many questions and no time to answer them. It was very stressful,” said Isabelle Olisah, a sophomore here at Burke. The subject she was most nervous about was science; she felt unprepared for the science portion of the PreACT.

“To prepare for the exam, I did some practice questions online.” Olisah said. “I mostly studied math, though.”

Another sophomore, Isabella Behne, states that to prepare herself for the PreACT exam, she went over basic math formulas and ensured she got a good night sleep the night before.

“I was definitely most nervous for math; I wasn’t sure what was going to be in that section of the test, and I wanted to make sure I didn’t have to guess on every question,” Behne said.

Time management appears to be the main problem for many sophomores, causing them to be the most nervous throughout the exam. It takes away from the test questions, leading them to fixate on the amount of time spent on individual questions.

“My main thing was just focusing on time, making sure that I had enough time to answer all the questions while being mindful of how long I spent on each individual question,” Behne said.