The season of standardized testing has arrived and with it the frustration of all the paperwork and fees to prepare for them.This Fall I decided I wanted to take the ACT test one time before my free ACT test the school provides in March. I didn't want to take the one in September because school had only just started and I also didn't want to wait until December because I didn't feel like my score would improve much between the 3 month gap. This left me with the October test date.
Unfortunately I waited until the last week of registration to register and pay for my test and my mom could only help me on the very last day after school. So in the last few hours of registration left I filled out all the information I could and had to wait for my mom a few minutes to come and fill in and submit the credit card information. When we were finished I hit the submit button and it automatically logged me out. I thought this was weird since before we submitted the page talked about uploading a photo for the admission ticket. I quickly logged back in to find where I should upload my photo and print out my ticket. However I could not find one thing about my transaction and all the information I had filled out, a good 7 or 8 pages were now completely blank.
I decided to send an email to the company to ask whether I had actually registered or not and went about the rest of my day. This was on the 18th of September, a Friday, on the following Wednesday I finally received a response email telling me they could find no evidence of my registration and if I still wanted to register I would have to pay the $25 late fee. My mom decided to call the company to see if since we had tried to register on time and their processing server screwed up we still had to pay the late fee. The person who responded told us their server had been working correctly all day when we tried to register and it was a problem on our side, they said this might happen if you wait too long to submit your information. So apparently the few minutes I waited for my mom to help me was too long for their server to wait and it lost all my information that had taken at least half an hour to fill out all the way.
The moral of my story is when you decide to register for the ACT have all your information ready to go including any billing information so you don't have to fill out 8 pages of information more than one time before it can work. Also be sure to register at least a few days before the deadline so if you have any technical difficulties or if the ACT website is being weird you won't be punished for it.
In case you're wondering I decided to wait and do the December ACT so I wouldn't have to pay the 25 extra dollars and I will save that money to take the P-SAT instead.This blog post really helped me with my decision, and it might help you with your test planning.
xoxo Kamel
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UPDATE: I did end up taking the ACT in December. When I filled out my information this time I made sure that my mom was ready to go when I needed her so the page wasn't inactive for longer then 5 minutes. This time the registration went through and immediately came to a new page with new instructions for uploading a picture and printing my ticket. So the ACT website does work you just can't leave it inactive for even a small amount of time. I hope this helps. <3/Kamel
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