Hi, I'm Melissa with PrepScholar, and I'm here today to share 5 strategies to ace your
ACT.
The ACT in particular is a really stressful test, not just because it's huge and important,
but also because it's actually designed to trick you.
So in this video, I'm going to be sharing 5 different ways that you can prepare and
make sure that you're not going to be fooled by any of the ACT's little tricks and all
of that.
If you find this video useful, subscribe to PrepScholar TV, our YouTube channel for all
of our different test prep and study skills videos.
Also, feel free to take a moment to let us know what your favorite ACT studying strategies
are below in the comments.
We'd love to hear from you.
So, without further ado, here are 5 strategies for passing your ACT.
First up, it's going to sound obvious, but the first one is always practicing.
And I know we've all heard the saying a million times, practice makes perfect, but
in the case of the ACT, it is absolutely true.
So practice tests are going to be one of your biggest assets in acing your ACT.
Not just because you've already done a whole bunch of them, but because they're something
that you can learn from.
And there's actually a whole lot of free practice tests available.
You don't have to go into some big program.
You don't have to spend a lot of money on prep books.
There's actually a lot of free resources out there that can help you get some practice
in.
I'm going to link a whole bunch of those down in the description, so please do take
a moment to flip through them.
Obviously, taking ACT practice tests is going to familiarize you with the test itself so
that you're, you know, you're going to know what you're looking at when you're
doing it.
It's also going to give you a good sense of how long it takes you to answer a question.
Overall on the ACT you only have between 36 seconds to a minute to answer your question,
so you're really going to want to make sure that you're using your time wisely.
There's something that practice tests do for you that's even more important than
gauging your time or getting you familiar with the test, and that's letting you make
mistakes that you can learn from.
So when you take a practice test, one of the best things that you can do is go through,
correct it, find your mistakes, and then not just like let those mistakes go and assume
that you're going to do better next time, but actually analyze them.
Figure out where you're going wrong so you know the areas that you need to study so that
you can do better next time.
The most important thing is that when you take a bunch of practice tests that you're
not just assuming that the act of practicing is going to make you better.
What's actually going to make you better is that you see your mistakes, you figure
out what they are, and you say, "I'm not going to do that again."
That is what a practice test can do for you.
So, jumping off of that, the second big thing that you can do to improve your ACT score
is to understand the different ways that you can be wrong on a question.
Obviously, we tend to think, "Oh, well I got the question wrong."
I mean, sure, it's not untrue.
But the thing that it's important to understand is that there are actually multiple ways to
get a question wrong.
So as you're taking ACT practice tests, you might begin to realize that a lot of the
answers sound really similar.
And that's not a mistake, and that's not you being like, "Oh, I just don't understand
this."
It's actually by design.
The ACT uses these really tricky strategies to make it look as though all of the answers
are equally viable.
In fact, there's only ever going to be one correct answer, and the biggest skill you
can develop is eliminating the ones that sound like the correct answer but aren't.
This is especially true of the ACT reading section, which is where a lot of people get
thrown off by answers that sound very similar.
So what we're going to do is we're going to take a look at a few of these different
ways that you can be wrong, and use those to better understand what the ACT is asking
for.
So the first thing we're going to talk about is answers that are irrelevant.
And this sounds really simple, like, "Oh, of course if a question is about Nebraska
and it starts talking about the Empire State Building, then we know that the Empire State
Building answer is wrong."
And while it would be nice if all ACT questions were that simple, that's just not the case.
An irrelevant answer is one that could be true, but isn't supported within the text.
And that being supported within in the text is so important to understanding your ACT
questions.
So don't be fooled.
Always answer the question that's being asked.
Don't just choose an answer because it is provably true.
So the second big one is answers that are actually the opposite of what's being said.
And again, this might sound obvious.
It sounds like it would be really easy to avoid answers that are saying the opposite.
The thing that throws people off here is that a lot of these, if you're just skimming,
can sound like really probably answers.
So you might see language that sounds like what you're thinking, but the thing that
you need to discern to make sure you're getting the right answer is that it's actually
in agreement, not just that it sounds like it.
The third major way that the ACT will try to trick you is with concept jumbles.
Concept jumbles take important information from the text, and it might be partially true,
but they mix it together in a way that ultimately contradicts the correct answers.
Again, don't be fooled.
Like i said, the ACT is really going to go out of its way to try to trick you.
Always read the passage for context to make sure that you understand exactly what's
happening around the question, not just what's happening in the questions itself.
The concept jumble answers are counting on the fact that you're not reading thoroughly.
So number one tip: read thoroughly.
The fourth possible way that a question will try to trick you is through plausible interpretations.
So plausible interpretations are particularly hard to spot, because they are, by nature,
plausible.
What this means is that they represent something that you could interpret from the text, but
the world could there is extremely important.
You could do it, but what you need is concrete evidence to support whatever answer you choose.
If you can't find clear, concrete evidence in the text for an answer, go ahead and cross
it out, because it's probably just a plausible interpretation and not actually the correct
answer.
The important thing to remember is that you will always, always, always find textual support
on the ACT.
So again, ACT questions can be extremely tricky.
That's why knowing these ways that they'll try to trick you and then being able to cross
out answers that fall into these categories of irrelevancy, or concept jumbles, or of
viable interpretation, make it so much easier to choose the correct answer.
So the third major tip for acing your ACT is going to be to pre-plan your essay.
And I know right off the bat, that sounds impossible, because how can you know what
the prompt is going to be before you've even seen the test?
But here's the thing: over time, it's been demonstrated that despite the fact that
the ACT will often change its prompts from year to year, they're always going to fall
along the same theme.
So planning a few ideas ahead of time can actually save you like 10, 15, 20 minutes
when you're writing your essay.
If you're the kind of person who sits there and is like, "I don't know what to write
about.
There's all these choices.
What the heck am I going to do?"
You can same a whole bunch of time by having like 4 or 5 topics right in your brain before
you even start the test.
Here's what's important to know.
No matter how the question is framed, it generally will come back to one core theme, which is
"how has humanity changed the world?"
The question may also ask you how you feel about that change, but because that's based
on your own feeling, and if you take a little time to think about it beforehand, you're
not going to have any trouble answering that.
So before you even take the test, even before you even schedule the test, go ahead and take
a minute to think about how you might answer that question if it was presented to you.
You can also choose concrete examples to relate this question to in your life.
Maybe you're an artist and you want to think about how art changes the world, or you're
a scientists and you want to think about how science has changed the world.
These are all things that you can think about ahead of time and then fold them into your
ultimate essay to make it even stronger, especially if you have research to back it up.
Speaking of research, it's also important to know that while you will be graded on your
essay, you're probably not going to be fact-checked.
You can actually go ahead and just make stuff up.
Obviously it should be within the realms of reality.
You shouldn't be saying, you know, humanity has changed the world because we caused unicorns
to go extinct.
That's just - that's kind of silly.
But if it comes to like, oh, I know that carbon emissions have increased by a certain percentage
but I can't remember what exactly it is, obviously you're not going to be able to
look it up, so you just make it up.
The grader isn't going to fact-check it, and ultimately it's not really about whether
you can memorize facts and statistics, but rather whether you can write a good essay.
Obviously, like I said, you're going to want to keep things close to reality, primarily
so that your answer doesn't sound flippant.
You don't want your grader reading your essay and thinking, "This person didn't
take this seriously at all."
So the fourth big tip for acing your ACT is going to be to use your time wisely.
And again, this is going to sound obvious.
This is going to be like, "Well, of course I'm not going to like, spend some time doodling
on the paper or staring off into space.
This is a big important test.
Why would i do that?"
But there are actually ways to minimize the amount of time that you're spending on things
that don't actually matter.
So one of the big ways that you can do this is to actually not bubble any of your answers
until the end of the test.
Instead, as you're going through and answering questions, just circle the answer and then
at the end of the test, obviously leave yourself some times, three to five minutes usually
will be enough, you go back through, look at the answers you've circled, and transfer
those to your answer sheet.
The second thing you can do is to skip hard questions.
Remember, you only have a minute at most to answer each question.
If you don't know what the correct answers is, just skip it.
Don't waste your precious time on questions that you don't know the answer to and that
you're not going to be able to figure out within 30 seconds or so.
It ultimately will save you a lot of time and make it a lot easier on you if you are
able to just let the questions that you don't know go and return to them later and maybe
guess on a couple.
There's also just a whole bunch of quick tips you can follow to make the most out of
your ACT.
So look for conciseness on the reading and English questions.
And the reason I say this is because a lot of times, it's easy to get fooled by a big
long complex answer, when most of the time what the ACT actually is looking for is something
simple.
It's looking for your ability to read.
Don't be fooled by really long answers or answers with lots of complicated language
in them.
They probably aren't the right ones.
The second thing: math shouldn't be requiring long, complex formulas.
The ACT, though tricky, is going to test your knowledge, and it's not going to be asking
you to spend lots and lots of time solving formulas, especially because you only have,
again, 36 seconds to one minute to answer the question.
If you find yourself whipping out formulas you've only used once or twice, you probably
don't need them.
Down in the description, you can find a link to our blog post all about 31 different formulas
that you'll need to know on the ACT.
Not all of them may come up, but it's going to be better to know them to not know them.
When it comes to the reading section, you're going to want to actually skim the passage
first, then read the question in-depth, then go back and find the part that the question
is referring to and read that in-depth.
Don't waste your time reading the whole thing in depth, and then reading all the of
the questions in-depth, because all you're going to do is forget things.
You're going to be spending way too much time.
Just be sure that you get the gist of stuff so that when you look at the question you
can find the part that you're looking for if they don't identify specific lines in
the question itself.
In the science section, you're going to want to focus on core concepts.
You're not going to need to know a whole lot of big scientific vocabulary.
You're not going to need a whole lot of really theoretical knowledge.
Generally, what the science section is looking for is actually your ability reason through
a question rather than that you know physics, or chemistry, or nuclear physics or whatever.
All they want to know is that you can reason your way through a problem.
Also in the science section, and in the math section, for that matter, pay attention to
diagrams.
Diagrams are where you're going to find most of the information that you need, and
paying attention to them is going to save you some time in referring back to the question,
which may be extra dense or which maybe is harder to scan.
Diagrams are your best friend.
So, now that you've had a quick guide to how to get a better score on the ACT, take
some time to really read through different guides and understand exactly how you can
maximize your ACT score.
Down in the description box below we have a whole bunch of links to PrepScholar articles
that can help you maximize your score by understanding exactly how the ACT functions.
Thank you so much for watching, and please let me know your favorite study tips down
in the comments below.
I can't wait to hear from you guys.
Have a great day, and happy prepping!
For more infomation >> Alarming statistics for electric scooter riders as injuries, accidents rise - Duration: 0:54. 
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét