5 Simple ACT Tips to Maximize Your Score

See if you have enough points for this item. The Birds and Bees of Words. Roget's Thesaurus of Words for Intellectuals. Word Smart, 6th Edition. Grammar Girl's Words to Sound Smart. The Chambers Crossword Dictionary, 3rd edition. More Word Smart, 2nd Edition. Roget's Thesaurus of Words for Writers. Improve Your Word Power. Dictionary of English Synonyms: Roget's Thesaurus of Words for Students. Chapter 2 of 6. The Lady, or the Tiger?

The Editors of REA. The Imp of the Perverse. The Power of Spoken Words. Discussion 1 of Notes from an Isolated Man. SAT Prep Plus Chapter 3 of Boot Camp for Your Brain. The Power of Self Control. The Story of a Novel. Sharon Weiner Green M. Chapter 4 of Improving Paragraphs Practice Questions. The Cask of Amontillado.

A Down by a Tomorrow. I would if I knew about them. Two are by CollegeBoard so they seem pretty legitimate. They have a decently high rating.


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I would at least check them out. Get a test after you take it: If you are a student and you are taking an official test, you can pay a fee and have the test mailed to you after the test date. I did this a couple times. It gives you a free test to review. You can only do this up to 5 months after your test date. If you do some digging online, you can find more sometimes. If anyone has found anymore, feel free to leave a comment with the link so I can add it to the resources for our community.

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That should be more than enough tests. They have fairly realistic tests and actual answer explanations that will help you. What if you want more real tests? People would get a QA and scan it. They would trade and sell tests online. People had databases of all the tests all the way back to and before that. They also had a lot of old school guides and eBooks by top test scoring students. Some of which were called Grammatix and The Xiggi Method, which were highly acclaimed in the community.

However, it is illegal or outdated. The practice test property is owned by College Board and is intended for distribution only to the buyer of the QA. I suggest you be careful. What I have provided so far is more than enough tests. From experience, quality practice beats quantity. One of the periods where my score increased the least was when I was solely focused on getting through and reviewing as many practice tests as possible per week.

You are missing half the questions. You are getting most of them wrong. You need to take your time and figure out why this answer is right and this answer is wrong. Should I get all volumes of Direct Hits? There are new volumes because the author updates every year or so. Get the latest two years at the very least and that should be enough. If you want to cover all bases, then I would highly suggest all the volumes. These are just my opinions though, which may be wrong. It took me, starting out, maybe a full week to finish an entire practice tests with all its sections working a couple hours a night with maybe one night off.

Eventually, I got to a point where I could do it in 2 to 3 days spending 3 or 4 hours. Again, I had a mindset where I found it fun, which helped. If you end up becoming a voracious practice test taker like me, then you will need more. I would say 50 is more than a solid number. Should I get the DVD with the book s? Only if whoever is taking the test prefers to take the test electronically. It may be better if it keeps him or her more engaged and more open to learning.

Eventually, I suggest transitioning to paper and pencil because that is how the real test is administered right now.

SAT Tips Cheats & Tricks - The Ultimate 1 Hour SAT Prep Course by Alec Smart on Apple Books

Should I use a highlighter when doing foundation building work? Some people I know did. Others I know did not. Just know you only get a pencil on the actual test so maybe you might want to eventually shift to circling or highlighting. Should I skip questions I do not know the answer to? I did the math and you gain no advantage or disadvantage if you skip a question or blindly guess. There are five multiple choice. On average, you will get one out of every five blind guesses right which equates to zero: I would suggest not skipping any and guess.

You get a deduction of zero if you leave a question blank. The best practice seems to be to give yourself 1 to 2 minutes and then skip it. You will not have time to come back with this strategy though because of how stringent the timing is. You should practice a lot before the actual date so you get to a point where you can fairly easily answer all the questions within the time limit and not be stressed. If you liked this article, please share it with someone you think would find it useful!

If you have any pain points or problems, leave a comment so that I can better understand you and bring value to you! Your email address will not be published. Guess how much all of that helped me? He taught me two big things in regards to academics and the SAT: It is a skill that you can get better at, not something that is fixed. I soon decided to hang around him as much as I can and his mindset rubbed off on me. Should you take the SAT more than once? I was very inspired and learned quite a bit from the forum.

Take real administered SAT tests. No more of the fake practice test booklets from test prep companies. Most of the perfect scorers were taking real practice tests to get better. It makes logical sense. You want the questions, passages, format, and style of the company actually making the tests: You can get your hands on maybe 10 to 20 of these fairly easily. Not all test prep books are bad. I have taken 50 to practice tests from these test prep textbooks.

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Might I remind you that each practice test is maybe 6 to 8 hours to complete. Some of those books just wasted half a year of my time. I knew they were lower quality and yet I kept plowing through them. Some test prep books are better than others but some were just pretty bad. They were far off in terms of the style and type of questions and mathematics problems they asked on the real tests. Once you take enough real tests, you get almost a six sense for the type of math questions, reading passages, and type of questions they ask you.

The style gets pretty routine and expected. It was pretty clear that some of the crappier practice test textbooks did NOT do this and had questions that would never be asked. Choose the right vocab lists. I tried a few times to memorize some of the words in the list to no avail as it was just too much. That was all fine and dandy. He boasted about how a previous student of his had done this and filled chests full of flashcards that she eventually memorized.

Many of the top scorers did not do this and neither did my friend. I wasted a lot of time memorizing a ton of words that were never on the test. Also, make sure you ask how well your tutor scored on the SAT before you ever hire him. I never did out of politeness and I do not know if my parents ever did. What I found is that there are many shorter lists with a much higher quality list of words that are much more likely to be on the test.

Having a good vocabulary, like it or not, is vital to scoring well. What they used to do on the College Confidential online SAT prep forum was do a direct scientific assessment of vocab lists and how often they would appear in official SAT tests that were recently administered. It was quite extensive and most likely used actual computer programs.

They would back-test and search these tests and see how many of the vocab words in each of the vocab lists out in the market were on the actual tests. The results were incredible. It fluctuates from month to month, but the top scorers are almost always Direct Hits and Rocket Review.

This is incredible because each volume of Direct Hits has only about words you need to memorize. I will get more into this in the Resources section of this article. Have a strong foundation. By this, I mean that you have to know the basics of what will be tested on. You have to understand the limits of what they are testing in Math, Reading Comprehension, and so on.

For instance, in terms of the Math section, it is basic algebra, geometry, numbers, operations, and basic statistics. That is as hard as it gets. Even if you think you know this well, it is best of you do a complete refresher. I finished learning all of this math back in middle school since I was in the advanced Math course.

Most high school students learn all of this a year before you take the test.

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That is also partially why the expensive SAT Math course by the asian genius math professor did not help. He brought out a lot of fancy equations and problems that were far beyond the scope of what was ever tested. He sure knew his math. But it did not help me succeed. In fact, it discouraged me at the time from ever believing I would do well in math. I tried really hard but did not understand a lot of the more complicated problems he solved. I strongly recommend a refresher.

They literally devote the first couple hundred pages to an extensive tutorial on every aspect of each of these sections you need to know in the rare case you never learned geometry. It was a great refresher and filled in any gaps on the more advanced or tricky things in geometry you forget about.

I found this very useful for the Writing and Math section. The writing section, especially, could be mastered with strong foundation and a lot of practice tests. Because it is a lot of basic grammar rules. I ended up being very good at grammar and this ended up being my best section.

I went through the tutorial pages, highlighted, and really studied it. I learned all the grammar rules and applied them. I suggest this over buying grammar books like Elements of Style, which my tutor made me buy. That book did not help me at all. Have the right mindset. Again, part of this was due to luck. I was a bit of a mess as a freshman in high school for a lot of reasons. My mindset shift was largely part of hanging around my friend. I started believing that getting good grades and a good score was a skill and process that could be learned rather than something that was fixed.

I started realizing that this could be fun rather than boring and a task, which is how I had thought about it for a while. Again, notice how this did not come from my parents being able to instill this in me. Maybe you can find a person like my friend and introduce him to your child.

But my friend is a bit rare in having this quality so it is not an easy find. Maybe you can share this article to your child and he might listen to me, if not to you. Anyhow, I found this could be fun. I started enjoying timing myself taking the test and seeing if I can take it faster and more accurately within the time limit.

I enjoyed coming home and taking part of a practice test because I was excited about the improvements I was making.

SAT Preparation: How To Score High On the SAT

Having the right mindset is very important because rather than you being burnt out, you enjoy it and do more and more. In the long term, you get more practice and do well. This is outside of my Top 4 but I think this is very important as well: Initially, do not time them. Write them as well as you can. But fairly quickly, you need to start timing them. The time limit is very short and gives you a sense of the length and quality of essay you can put on given the short time. Ideally, make 3 quality references to books, life experiences, and stories to support your point.

However, it usually makes you argue for a point or support a point. I was never really good at this because I did not read a lot of books back then or have extensive life experiences. The people who did well on essays, including my friend, always references at least one book. It helped that they were in advanced English and read a lot more than I did. The Most Important Part: The following is an example of the Vocab List Scoring Results as explained earlier: Here are the results: If you must have more vocab: Frequently Asked Questions Should you time the test when practicing?

Eventually, you have to start timing. Again, you can take your time with this. My test date is coming up very soon? How many practice tests is enough? Just know you only get a pencil on the actual test so maybe you might want to eventually shift to circling or highlighting Should I skip questions I do not know the answer to? Conclusion In summary, becoming a master of the SAT is not a matter of luck or genetics. You can increase your score dramatically with patience and deliberate practice over time. To increase the speed this happens, you have to optimize how you practice.

Use real or previously administered practice tests from College Board rather than practice tests modeled to look like real SAT questions from test prep companies. Answer explanations help tremendously. Have the right books that provide the most growth titles mentioned earlier. Join my email newsletter and get secrets I share nowhere else.

Now for your first test: