Crash Course for the ACT Ten Simple Steps for a Higher Score.

Crash Course for the ACT

Ten Simple Steps for a Higher Score

What is the ACT?

• The ACT is a standardized test used for college admissions, but can also be used for career purposes. The following tests are given in the following order:

• 45 min. English test with 75 questions• 60 min. Math test with 60 questions• 35 min. Reading test with 40 questions• 35 min. Science test with 40 questions• 30 min. Writing test with 1 essay prompt

English

• The English test will have five passages and each passage has 15 questions – some grammar and punctuation, and some style and content of the passage.

Math

The math test is always made up of the following questions:

• 14 pre-algebra• 10 elementary algebra questions• 9 intermediate algebra questions• 9 coordinate geometry questions• 14 plane geometry questions• 4 trigonometry questions• These questions do not necessarily come in order of difficulty. The easiest and

hardest questions can be scattered throughout the test, although there is a general trend of increasing difficulty throughout the Math test. Don’t assume after several hard questions that you’ve reached a point where you won’t know the answer to anymore of them.

Reading

The Reading test is made up of four passages, with 10 questions for each passage. The are in the following order:

• prose fiction• social science• humanities• natural science Each passage will be about 85-90 lines long. There is

just reading and answering questions in this test.

Science

The Science test has three types of passages:

• 3 charts and graphs passages with 5 questions each• 3 experiments passages with 6 questions each• 1 “fighting scientists” passage with 7 questions

This test covers a variety of topics from biology, physics and earth science. It is crucial to remember that you can do well on this part of the test even if you’re not good in science. Also, there’s no order of difficulty.

Writing

The Writing Test will have one essay prompt and you have 30 minutes to respond to the prompt. The prompt will define an issue with two points of view and you will take a position on the issue and respond. The topic will be something relevant to high school students.

Scoring

You will receive a score for each test and a composite score of all of the tests, and a series of subscores. The composite score is what most colleges use in decision-making on applicants. The range on the composite score is 1-36.

Colleges vary in what they are looking for, but a minimum ACT composite score for admission to colleges in the UNC system is 17.

General Strategy• PRACTICE taking test- the more familiar you are with the ACT, the better

you will do. You cannot go wrong taking as many practice tests as you can get access to.

• WRITE on the test. Don’t just do the work in your head and bubble an answer. Write down the steps or pieces of the problem, as you go, in your test book. Questions on the ACT are full of partial, misleading and distracting answers that are there to trip you up. If you do the work in your head (not just math – Reading, English and Science too), you can fall into the trap they’ve set with the answers. On the math portion, you will use your calculator a lot. Most people plug it all into the calculator and get to an answer without writing anything down. This is a bad idea. You don’t have to do long-hand on the problems – use the calculator, but write down the parts as you go. The people writing the questions use those “step” answers as answer choices and this can trip you up. Write all over the test – it’s YOUR test.

• An additional suggestion is that you do a page of problems or all the questions from a reading passage, marking your answer in the book, then go bubble all those answers down. Going back and forth to bubble after each individual question takes more time. HOWEVER, BE SURE YOU GO BACK AND BUBBLE ON THE ANSWER SHEET IF YOU ARE MARKING IN THE TEST BOOK AND BUBBLING LATER. ONLY THE BUBBLE SHEET IS SCORED!

General Strategy cont.• Never leave a bubble empty. GUESS if you do not know. ACT does

not penalize for guessing (SAT does). If you’re down to a minute or less with several questions left to do, just bubble something one letter for those questions left. You may guess correctly on some of them.

• USE TIME WISELY – Never spend time zoning out, napping or thinking about things outside the test, DURING THE TEST! Use EVERY minute to work as quickly as you can and if you end up with extra minutes before time is up, go back and look at the questions that you were unsure of the first time. Any “down time” lowers your score. Be “ON” for the entire time of every test.

• Maintain your brain – You need a lot of energy for a 4-hour test! Get enough sleep the night before, eat a good breakfast, bring a snack for the break and try to be as focused as you possibly can for the test.

English Test• Underlined phrases will be a big portion of the English test and you

will decide whether that portion is correct or not. If it’s not, you choose what the correction is – whether it is punctuation or verb agreement, etc. A technique to know is: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it! Anything not underlined is perfect – you don’t have to do anything with it. Frequently, the underlined part depends on the non-underlined part. If you keep in mind that both parts have to agree, you’ll do better.

• The first answer choice will always be, “NO CHANGE.” This means it is already correct as it is. Don’t be afraid to choose this – 25% of the underlined phrases are right. Don’t assume there must be something wrong with the phrase.

• Use the answer choices. If the choices are different forms of the same verb, you need to determine tense of the verb. If the choices are commas in different places, the answer is going to be about comma placement. The answers will tell you what to focus on when doing the question.

Math Test

The Math test will consist of the following:

Pre-Algebra – 14 questionsElementary Algebra- 10 questionsIntermediate Algebra – 9 questionsCoordinate Geometry – 9 questionsPlane Geometry – 14 questionsTrigonometry – 4 questions

Don’t Get Stuck

The math on the ACT is not done with increasing level of difficulty. There will be easier problems and hard problems at the beginning as well as the end. Don’t let yourself spend a long time on a hard question when there are still easy ones to be answered. Give it your best answer choice and mark it to go back to if you have extra time.

Two Pass System Do the math in what is known as the “two pass” system. • On your first pass through, deal with two types of questions: those

you know and those you know are too hard for you. Also, circle and skip those you can do, but will take some time and work. Once you’ve worked through the entire math test, (finishing the first pass-through), come back and work on problems you circled and skipped.

This allows you to get correct answers on all the easier problems – for the entire math section. Otherwise, you could run out of time and lose the opportunity to get to those that would be easy, but you didn’t get to them because they were toward the end. All problems have the same point value – nothing extra for any question you took twice as long to answer so be sure and get to the ones you can do quickly.

• On the second pass, go back and work on the ones you circled, using all the time down to about a minute or two, at which point you go to the guessing strategy.

Don’t Live in the Past

ACT is constantly changing. The three major changes from years past is that ACT has pretty much eliminated the “plug and chug” questions that you can just toss in your calculator and come out with the answer. There are more long word questions with elaborate set-ups, there is more useless info tossed into questions and they are asking more theoretical questions. What this means to you is that you must do more thinking about the mathematical concepts behind the problems instead of just putting numbers in the calculator. Keep that in mind when you’re doing the “two-pass” strategy.

Ballparking

Every question on the math has one right and four wrong answers. You must eliminate the wrong and pick the right answer. They build the wrong answers by working the problem and making the kind of careless mistakes a student in a hurry might make. It’s sneaky and designed to trip you up. In order to keep this from happening, use “Ballparking.”

This is the name of a process in which you read the question, figure out roughly what the right answer will be (without doing the actual problem) and then cross out any answers that are too big or too small. Ballparking will rarely eliminate all four wrong answers, but will frequently eliminate two. This narrows your choices and that can really help.

Reading

• Four tests, forty questions• Passages are usually 85-90 lines long• 4 passages with 10 questions for each passage,

4 answer choices for each question• Passage topics are: prose fiction social science humanities natural science

What To Do

• There’s no way the average person can read all four passages and still have time to do the forty questions in the time allotted. You need a plan!

• Most students do the reading passages in the order given: prose fiction first, and so on. This is a mistake. Boring topics are harder to do because you aren’t interested and it makes it much more difficult to pay attention. Topics that interest you are easier – you pay attention.

• Spend the first minute of the reading test flipping through and looking at the passages – read the blurb for each passage and decide where to start.

Reading: What to Do cont.

• Start with the ones that interest you. Reorder the passages to take advantage of your strengths.

• ACT deliberately uses the pressure of timing on the reading test against you. Because the answers are right there in the passages, they can’t do the sneaky options they do in the other sections, so having more to read and answer than time allows is their strategy. The authors of the “Crash Course” book suggest that if you get 3 out of 4 passages done with accuracy, you could get a pretty decent score.

Reading: What To Do cont.

• “If you can complete three of the four passages with 80 percent accuracy (getting eight right out of every ten questions, or 24 right for the set of 30) and then guess on the ten questions you skip from the fourth passage, you’ll get about 26 raw points. That generally works out to a 25 on the Reading test, which is the 81st percentile.”

Reading: What To Do cont.

• Now that you’ve picked the order of your passages, either quickly skim the passage or go directly to the questions.

• The points given on the Reading test are given for one thing only – correctly answering the questions. No points are given for how well you read the passage.

• The majority of the passage is not asked about in the questions.

Reading: What To Do cont.• You do have to read to get the questions

right, but read ONLY what you need in order to answer the question correctly. You must focus your reading to do the questions while ignoring the rest of the passage.

• Just as you reordered the passages for what interested you most, you can reorder the questions in order to do the ones that are easier first.

Science

The Science test contains three types

of passages:

• 3 charts and graphs passages with 5 questions each

• 3 experiments passages with 6 questions each

• 1 “fighting scientists” passage with 7 questions

Science Technique: Ignore the Intro

All of the science passages, except “Fighting Scientists” has a large amount of useless and confusing information. Rarely do the questions refer back to the intro. This is done to intimidate and slow you down. Most of the questions involve looking up information in the charts and tables- not referring back to the introduction – reading the introduction is a waste of time with all the passages except “Fighting Scientists.”

Science – The Questions

There are 3 types of questions, except for “Fighting Scientists.”

• Look it up – easy to do, look up info in one of the charts, graphs or tables

• What if – make predictions, draw conclusions or analyze data

• Why – trickiest – deal with the ideas behind how experiments are set up and how the scientific process works

Summary

Go into the ACT testing session

• Having practiced taking the ACT as much as possible

• On time

• Well-rested

• Not hungry

• Stay focused for entire test