Eyes peeled open after a long week at school, a long drive consisting of highways and Michigan lefts on a Saturday morning leaves a bitter taste in your mouth for standardized testing. Pondering what you will do with your excess time after each dreaded section leaving time for you to think about how colleges will assess your knowledge based on a three-hour exam seems daunting.

In direct contrast to this, the ACT is a better accuracy test for knowledge to submit to colleges. This exam is three hours but split up into more sections than the SAT. The English section, the Math section, the Reading and Science sections. Since these sections are shorter, they are more intuition based due to the lack of time to check over work. In relation to this, the questions on the ACT are based on critical thinking skills. For example, the science section is mainly based on data comprehension, a crucial skill for many college majors.

According to Healthline, research links intuition to certain brain processes, such as evaluating and decoding emotional and other nonverbal cues from time throughout your life. Because students know much of this knowledge from previous classes, oftentimes their first answer is correct without the ability to second guess.

In order to demote this extra time, the ACT has gotten timing down to a perfect science and is simply based more strongly on intuition which is a true test of knowledge rather than the longer dreaded SAT.

The SAT consists of three sections: reading, writing, and math. A three hour and fifteen minute endeavor. Because the SAT is longer for each section, there’s much more room for error due to the excess time to check over work, mainly resulting in more error. These silly mistakes can lead to a misrepresentation of knowledge for college admissions on your intuition, which is based on previous knowledge of classes students have taken.

These standardized tests are truly different for each student and based on preference. They have many other factors such as the difficulty of questions and the ability of a student to retain each subject. However, students need to learn how to trust their intuition and this is why colleges emphasize these tests for acceptance.