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 nonunderlined 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 questions
Elementary Algebra- 10 questions
Intermediate Algebra – 9 questions
Coordinate Geometry – 9 questions
Plane Geometry – 14 questions
Trigonometry – 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 passthrough), 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