Remember those big, fat beginner pencils you used in the first grade? The ones that have leads three or four times thicker than the leads in conventional pencils? We mean something like this. They could be the key to a small but non-trivial score boost to your SAT or ACT score. How so?
On the SAT, the student needs to fill in about 180 circles (“bubbles”) on the answer sheet. That’s a lot of circles. And they are kind of big. We wondered whether a fat pencil might speed things up. The answer is it does, especially when we compared a fat pencil that was somewhat dull with a conventional pencil that was sharp. After running some tests, we figure the student can save at least 3 minutes in total on the test, and probably something more like 4 minutes, up to about 6 minutes. What is the extra time of about 4 minutes worth? If we assume that 4 more minutes means getting about 4 more questions right, the score impact would be around 30-40 extra points. That’s a lot just for switching to a different pencil! We tutors would kill to get our students an extra 30 points.
On the ACT, the effect is muted because the ovals the student has to fill in are quite a bit smaller than the circles on the SAT. On the other hand, there are more questions. We estimate the student might pick up extra time of about 3 minutes. If that means getting 3 more questions right, that might be roughly an extra half point on the ACT composite or just a bit more. Not as dramatic, but we’ll still take it.
Three suggestions if you decide to experiment with this. Try the fat pencil before test day – make sure you are completely comfortable with it. And if you do decide to go fat, bring a couple of conventional pencils on test day just in case you have a Rottweiler of a proctor who dreams up some objection to the fat pencil. These are standard #2 pencils that exactly meet the test rules, but you never know, and just before the test is the wrong time to duke this out. Finally, if you are doing the essay, you’ll probably want to write that with a conventional pencil.