[36bydesign]

Do you recall when you took the test? I’d like to find the test because I work with ACT tests daily and have never seen a passage where the laws of physics were intentionally violated for sake of “comprehension.”

Additionally the ACT reading passages are very focused, not vague. They may be uninteresting but much of a student’s college experience is reading uninteresting things. The ACT is designed to predict how students will perform in college, not how “smart” they are or how “good of a reader” they are.

[kurthr]

I similarly had a question on my 4th grade qualification exam. In the science section they asked a multiple choice question as to what would change the weight of a glass of water. One of the "wrong" answers was heating it... luckily I knew that I wasn't supposed to know relativity so I answered it correctly.

[z3t4]

That's when you leave a friendly note. But I guess you are not supposed to think for yourself. Just react.

[gumby]

> much of a student’s college experience is reading uninteresting things.

Wait, what?? That was certainly not my experience, and judging by the barrage of texts I get from my now college-attending child, isn't his experience either.

He did find a lot of what he was given in his California high school was boring. Enrolling in it was a bit of a shock after his prior experience.

[jaredklewis]

Reading is often boring when the text is not of interest to the reader. Perhaps it depends on your major and so on, but as a former English major I would find it extraordinary for someone to go 4 years of college and never read any text they weren’t interested in. Not to say that any of the books I read in college were bad, but taste is a thing. Just because something has won a Pulitzer Prize or whatever doesn’t mean it will be equally interesting to all people.

[projektir]

Pretty much every "recognized" book I've read was interesting in some way or another. I might have disliked it, or disagreed with it, but it surely wasn't boring. I used to find lots of books boring when I had no idea how to read them. Especially older works require context to read them in. You have to figure out why you are.

Another thing is that a book may not be worth the investment, but that's a different category. I don't really want to read War and Peace or Infinite Jest, but I doubt they're boring. I'll just get more enjoyment bang for my buck out of reading my preferred genre, but if I had to read them for professional reasons (I consider college such) it wouldn't be an issue.

> taste is a thing

Taste is a very, very overblown thing. It's often used as a strict thing, set in stone, and giving full carte blanche to ignore lots of works or people. But in reality it's very flippant and malleable and often developed out of sheer chance.

You'll find that people who don't read at all have no taste for any book.

[yorwba]

I'm studying CS and don't even look at textbooks until I'm doing a problem set and realize that I don't yet know enough to solve it. In most cases, I just need to look up a definition. Then I can search for the relevant passage and read just that, which doesn't feel boring because I have a clear goal.

Of course that strategy doesn't work if you're asked to "read this book and write about it" (Obviously, I have no idea what an English major is like.), but when it's applicable, postponing reading until you have an immediate reason to do it helps me a lot to avoid boredom.

[th3byrdm4n]

>They may be uninteresting but much of a student’s college experience is reading uninteresting things.

Wow. What a revelatory statement.

Some reflecting observations. 1. Since when is an institution designed to increase your knowledge uninteresting?? That signals a broken institutional approach.

2. The number one real world skill is being able to filter for signal against noise.

If you're inserting a bunch of noise into the test, the most highly-adapted minds are going to be filtered out with low results.

[setr]

If you're learning something foundational, it's usually incredibly dull until after you've learned it. Its difficult to imagine anyone finds matrices, and associated basic operations, to be an interesting representation until after they've learned to make use of it to understand bigger ideas. Those first few lectures are horribly boring. And of course, undergrad is mostly foundational learning.

And then you should consider that at least in the US, you have 2 years of general education; that is, you have 2 years of courses outside the field you've explicitly decided liking.

And of course you can have a preference of practical over theory, where most lectures on theory are uninteresting unless they clearly lead up to a practical implication, that you're currently interested in.

It's absurd to imagine that anyone goes to college with a 100% interest in every course, unless the college caters directly to each student's whim. And we know they don't, and im not sure we want them to.

[Azeat]

No wonder the test costs money. If you can pay for uninteresting material that won't benefit you in the real world, you're prepared for college.

[pirocks]

Anecdotally as a recent high school student I recall taking numerous standardized reading tests with less than accurate science passages.