Advice on how to get an excellent ACT score

Horsiegirl101

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How can I improve my ACT scores? After studying, on my first test, I received:
English 67/76, overall 30
Math 35/60, overall 22
Reading 27/40, overall 23
Science 17/40, overall 17

After studying some more, I received the following score:
English 62/75, overall 27
Math 41/60, overall 25
Reading 18/40, overall 16
Science 28/40, overall 25

~Scores from The Real ACT, actual time limits were used.

I desperately want above a 32, but nothing I do seems to be working. Does anyone have any advice?
Practice books I've used include:
1. The Real ACT
2. Princeton Review: Cracking the ACT
3. Barron's ACT 36 (second edition)
4. Kaplan ACT Study Guide 2014

Please help me. I would like to go to an Ivy League School, but these scores are unacceptable. At the very least, I would like to go to a challenging in-state school (I live in Ohio). Does anyone have any advice?

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Hello, fellow Ohioan and a 33er here. To start off, what grade are you currently in? If you are a freshman or a sophmore, I would suggest waiting until April or June of your Junior year to start taking the ACT because of the math knowledge that is involved.

It looks like you need to work on your Reading and Science score a bit. For reading, I suggest, starting now, find articles from newspapers or magazines that are pretty close in length with the ones on the ACT and just practice reading them. After reading, pick out things like theme, author's purpose, main conflict, and stuff like that. For science, the only thing you can do is to do a bunch of science ACT questions until you are familiar with all of the different types of questions and feel confident about them. Really, this is also the only way to get a better score on the ACT overall. If I were you, I would just buy the practice books with all of those tests in it, because I think all of those "guides" say pretty much the same thing. Just one of those is enough in my opinion.

Also, in my opinion, the tests on the Real ACT book are wayyyy harder than the real ACT so don't get discouraged by that.

The best way to study (if you already have the grammar and math knowledge, of course) is to just do a whole bunch of practice tests until you feel confident. That's the secret.
 
Practice tests, practice tests, practice tests is my advice and keep taking the exam until you run out of time or make your goal. For a little extra, (when I took it anyway), you can get a copy of the test booklet and answer key when they send you your results and you can go over that and see what you missed and why. When I was in high school, I needed a 32 ACT score to get basically a full ride scholarship to my undergrad. I took it 9 times over the course of my 4 years in high school and pulled it up from a 25 to a 32. Most people think that is ridiculous, and it probably is to an extent, but I did what I had to do to pay for school. My scores plateaued out at 30-31 for 6 or so times, but I finally got that magic 32. I don't regret it.
 
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If you're not going to be a junior this fall there is no reason to even be thinking about this test yet. Just focus on your classes, as this will be your best method of long-term studying.

Practice tests, practice tests, practice tests is my advice and keep taking the exam until you run out of time or make your goal. For a little extra, (when I took it anyway), you can get a copy of the test booklet and answer key when they send you your results and you can go over that and see what you missed and why.

As someone who got a 33 and 34 and worked as an ACT/SAT tutor, I can say this is by far the best way to study. Get comfortable taking full length tests, even if you're not scoring as high as you'd like. My practice tests I always got between 27-29, but I just made sure that time wouldn't be an issue on the real thing. Seeing your low reading scores are tells me that timing is probably an issue you have right now. Once you get your timing down, you can focus on issues in individual sections.

Sectional advice:

Reading: As MeSoPro said, find passages/articles of appropriate length and identify important points (author's purpose, themes, examples supporting author's argument, etc.). Work on only having to read each passage 1 time. If you have to go back and read a sentence or two, or skim something, it's no big deal. If you have to re-read an entire passage it will hurt you time-wise. Bottom line is the more you read in general, the easier this section will become.

Science: Learn how to read charts and graphs and how to understand them inside and out. What does each axis mean? What are the units and what do they measure? Are there any trends in the data? If so, what do those trends mean? In 95% of these questions the answer is literally given to you if you understand what the charts/graphs mean.

Math: Do your math homework. Seriously, there isn't a great way to study for this other than to do math problems. The higher the level of math you take, the better off you'll be because you won't have to worry about whether or not you learned the content. So if you're not a junior, this is something that will naturally improve the more math you take in hs.

English: Along with reading, this is the toughest to improve imo. Take some practice tests, then review them in depth. Look at what kinds of problems you are missing and try and see if there are any trends. Are you mixing up homonyms like there/their/they're or its/it's? Are you struggling with matching tense (past/present/future) and number (singular/plural) of your subjects and verbs? For example, you would say "his dogs are big.", not "his dogs is big" (matching the proper noun/pronoun with the verb). Do you have troubles identifying full sentences vs. clauses vs. fragments? Once you can figure out what your weakness is, you can focus on it and hopefully bring up your score. This is something that can be very difficult to do on your own, so getting help from a teacher/parent/tutor can benefit a lot here.

A 32 is tough to get, especially since you're averaging around a 23. If you take a few more practice tests, chances are you'd get around a 26ish without studying, so 32 isn't impossible, but it is going to be very difficult. If you're going to be a junior, I'd say study 3-4 hours per week seriously and be consistent. Once you're about 1-2 months away from the test increase those hours and take some more full practice tests, 3-5 should be enough to at least get you comfortable for the real deal. Good luck and don't get discouraged if you're not happy and have to retake it!
 
I took the test ages ago (like freaking 2008... I feel so old :oldman:) so take my advice with a grain of salt.
I felt as if trigonometry (sin cos tan, right triangles, etc.) was SO heavily tested. For reading I read nightly, probably 5-6 chapters of a book that I enjoyed.
I got a 22 overall, but my only real studying was doing my homework and briefly skimming the Real ACT prep guide.
I am sure that if you put in the time of practice exams you will do great!!! Good luck :)
 
When I took it, I got a 35 composite, with 35 english/math/science and 34 reading.

English: Make sure you understand all the important grammar rules and do as much practice as possible. Do as many practice passages and questions as you can to understand common errors and catch on to trends.

Math: You don't need to be a whiz at math, but you do need to be able to work quick and find fast and efficient methods of solving the problem. Like English, this requires doing as many practice questions, sections as you can from prep books and exams to get a feel for solving basic math problems within the time.

Reading/Science: Unfortunately, my personal opinion is that these sections, mostly Reading, are capped by your innate reading comprehension ability. I've always been a heavy reader since early elementary school, reading classic novels, poetry and publications like the Economist, so I only had to do a few practice exams to get a feel for the types of passages and questions on the ACT. I also became an efficient reader so time was never an issue for me. It's obviously too late now to develop this (at least for the ACT, never too late to start for college exams and future standardized tests!) so I suggest just doing as many practice sections as you can to increase your speed in answering questions and reading the passages. Make sure you're able to identify key points, the meaning of the passage, and ALWAYS remember that the correct answer will be based on information from the passage.

Realistically for the Ivies, you'll probably need at least a 33, preferably 34-36 and also consider looking at the SAT. Some students are better at the SAT than ACT and vice versa.
 
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