Act what should i study

On the other hand, if you know you have some foundational review to complete for ACT English e. However you decide to spread out your time, build your calendar for the entire month before you get started studying.

Week 1 is about assessing your baseline score—where are you starting from and how far do you need to go in your prep to reach your score goal? Take a full-length practice test in a single setting. What are your greatest areas of opportunity? Alternatively, if you only missed a few Data Representation questions on the Science Test, you might want to focus less on reviewing associated concepts and spend more time studying specific test-taking strategies for those question types.

Be sure to spend a fair amount of time learning and practicing test-taking strategies and methods for each section. Some examples of things to remember are your planned ideas — your goals and strategies for each section. Things not to forget are any surprise topics, formulas, content, etcetera that you come across while studying. This personalized study sheet will be incredibly valuable at the end of the week!

On Monday, complete an English practice section. Confirm that you understand how the ACT asks the questions, and decide how long you are going to spend on each question. Some questions can be done in seconds — but others require more time.

What questions do you find yourself lingering over, and does this fit into your overall timing for the section? Confirm that you understand how the ACT asks the questions.

Decide how long you are going to spend on each question. This is a good spot to mention the two main pacing strategies you encounter when studying for ACT: interval timing and cognitive endurance. In the same way, you can increase your overall speed by improving your timing per passage and per question. For example, you could study one passage at a time and check your answers after every passage. If you find that it takes you longer to answer certain questions in each passage, you can factor that into the timing interval for that passage and adjust your speed accordingly, increasing your speed on easier questions to allow yourself more time on questions that take you longer to answer.

But eventually, you have to run the whole race. That is what we mean by cognitive endurance — you need to do longer and longer sections of the test at once so you know you can make it through the whole test on test day.

That means you should complete full sections without stopping to look at the answers as part of your studying. On Tuesday, practice the Math section. If you truly can only do one hour a day, or only four days a week, then commit to that. Make sure you do your studying somewhere you can focus: a quiet place free of distractions.

Distractions include your bed, TV, and computer. At home, your dining room or a study can be good places to work. The library is always a good place to study, and you can also look into using an empty classroom after school is out. You should start devoting more study time to these areas. Always misplacing commas? Go back and re-learn the rules of grammar. Triangles proving difficult? Not finishing the Reading test on time? Practice skimming the passages. Having a hard time locating information on the Science test?

Practice using keywords to find what you need. Taking regular breaks during your study time will help you focus better on your work, which can improve your final test score. The range between the two represents the scores of the middle 50 percent of admitted students. Here's a link to five free printable ACT practice tests, complete with answer keys so you can grade them yourself. Take one of these practice tests so you can see where you are relative to your target score.

When I say to take a practice test, I don't mean answer questions for a section casually throughout the day while watching YouTube videos in the background. Really force yourself to live the experience of the ACT as it is in the actual test environment. Set aside a weekend morning and go through each section with the same constraints you would have on the real test. Why should you subject yourself to such torment? Because it's the only way to get a good estimate of where you stand in relation to your target score.

Time pressure is a huge factor on the ACT, and it can impact your score significantly. Furthermore, going through all the sections in a row forces you to account for any fatigue you might experience on the later sections of the test. If you already know your starting point scores from a previous test or practice test, great! As soon as you settle on your test date, you'll be ready to cook up a study plan.

A bitter Salvador Dali painted this to try and convince himself that time was a meaningless construct after he ran out of it on the ACT. That way you'll be able to retake the test in the spring if necessary, and you'll be free to devote your senior year to college apps and devising elaborate senior pranks. Either way, you can find a study plan that works for you.

Here is a rough guide to how many hours of study time you should put in for a given point improvement:. Keep in mind that this is just a rough estimate of the hours you will need to put in to improve your score. If you want to improve points, you'll probably be able to accomplish your goal with light review, a single practice test, and a retake of the official test.

As you can see, the time you need to devote to studying if you're hoping for improvements of more than a few points is pretty significant. If you want to improve by more than 4 points or so, you'll have to do some in-depth content work to address gaps in your knowledge. The ACT tests a lot of different concepts , so it can take a while to cover them all.

This is why an earlier start is better. Ideally you should start studying sophomore year to space out your hours and gradually gain familiarity with the structure of the test. Everyone has different study habits and restrictions on time, so you should further customize your plan while keeping these hour estimates as a baseline.

How many weeks do you have before the test? How much time can you devote to studying in a typical week?