By Audrey Stotter
Staff Writer
ACT season is coming, and if you’re one of the many people slated to take it, you may be worried, you might not care, or you may feel something else. Remember, you can take the test as many times as you want, but your first test through school is a great time to prepare.
Why should you prepare? No, the ACT doesn’t determine your life or college. Many colleges are test optional these days; you can choose to not send your score. However, in addition to the obvious, good scores can also help you get scholarships for college. For example, one of the colleges I looked at starts at an extra $1,000 a year for a score of 24. Who knew studying for the ACT literally pays off?
There’s another reason to prepare: The ACT is designed to trick and trap you. You have to beat the system in order to do well. It has nothing to do with how good you are at a certain subject. It’s about how quickly and accurately you can answer questions.
But how do you prepare?
Practice tests. This is the most important tip. If you can only do one thing, do this. Even if you take just one, you’ll know what’s going to happen on the real thing and what you should improve on before then. Take more than one so you can get your mind to work with what works best for you. Do it under the real time conditions, even if you just do one section at a time. ACT officially has one on their website with more tips. There are also unofficial ones online. Make sure to find official tests, because that’s what the test will look like. Also, real ACT tests are curved, so what you get on a practice test might not be what you get in real life.
For English, sounding things out in your head isn’t enough, even if you are a native english speaker. Grammarly’s blog has a lot of resources on different parts of speech.
For Math, if you’re on an advanced math path like me, you might not have done the kind of math that’s on the test in a really long time! Once you take a practice test, see what math concepts you need the most improvement in. Then, brush up on them.
For Reading, if you don’t read fast, you’ll need to practice skimming. You can practice this by looking at articles and seeing how fast you can find things like quotation marks, proper nouns, and topic sentences. If you’re taking it on paper, read with your pencil, marking up everything important.
For Science, This one isn’t science, it’s science reasoning. Don’t read too much into any of the “procedure” paragraphs. The data from the graphs are more important. However, if you see the “scientist 1 vs. scientist 2” paragraphs, read all of it. Marking up useful things is very important in this section.
This is by no means a comprehensive way to study for the ACT, and there are many more resources online for you to explore. One I recommend is the Get2College guidebook. It’s aimed at students in Mississippi, but it has a lot of good tips.
Lastly, don’t study the day before the test. Start a month or so in advance. Once the big day rolls around, relax, grab the stuff you’ll need for the test, and go in ready to crush it!
Image Credits: https://summer.harvard.edu/blog/14-tips-for-test-taking-success/