Such incompetence...

As I mentioned in my last post, I took the ACT on April 10, 2010. What I didn't tell you is that the teacher that acted as the test proctor was extremely incompetent.

Warning: Once again, this will be another ranting post.

First off, the teacher decided to turn on the fan that was in the room. Sure, that was a nice gesture because it may have gotten hot, but she should have at least been considerate as to where she put this fan. She decided to set the fan directly in front of me. Thank you teacher for blowing my papers askew throughout the test. Also, I have pretty sensitive eyes, so as the fan oscillated across my face, I essentially started crying.

Following the first test of crying, I asked her to move the fan. She did so kindly, and we began the next test. All went well for that test and we took a break.

After the break we took the Reading portion of the test. She announces we will have 35 minutes for the test. She writes the end time of the test as 11:13 and none of us think anything of it. There were approximately 17 minutes left in the test and I thought, "Hey! I'm doin' pretty well!" Just as I thought that, the teacher goes up to the board and erases the 1 and changes it to a zero. The time now reads 11:03. She realized she accidentally calculated the time wrong and when we had all paced ourselves for the extra ten minutes, we were all suddenly screwed.

After this test, she instructs us to sign our answer form and write the sentence provided in cursive on the bottom. She then starts collecting our question booklets. It wasn't until a student announced, "Ummm...we haven't taken the science portion yet...," that she even realized we weren't done with the booklets. She passed them back and we began the test. You can imagine that we were then all flustered and I was certainly thrown off for the rest of the test.

As you can see, this teacher was extremely incompetent and could be part of the reason I may potentially get a lower score than I hope for. But only time will tell. I have considered writing it in, but I don't want to have to retake the test unless my score is low. I would rather get a low score and retake it than not know my score and retake it and not know until mid-June what my ACT score is.

All in all, my ACT testing was not a very good experience at all. The incompetent teacher and the overall test were both factors in this. But if I must retake it in the future, so be it. I'll just consider this the practice test!

Will you be incompetent?