<p>I haven't gotten my June ACT scores yet, but on my first try in April I got a 21 in reading.. :( I feel miserable because I've tried reading the questions before, and even going straight to the passage. On the June ACT, I randomly did all J's for the humanities passage. Are there any tips? I feel like I don't understand what I'm actually reading because of the unfamiliar vocab and I suck at identifying tone and mood, and for some humanities and prose fiction passages in the practice tests, I couldn't even figure out the meaning. For those of you who got a 30+ in ACT reading, could you guys please tell me how you approached the passages or what strategies you used? Any help would be greatly appreciated. </p>
When I took the pre-act I got a 22 on reading which, just like you, felt bad for making that grade. But then I tried to understand what the questions where actually going to be asking me before I decided to even try the test again. My mom bought me an ACT online course, and for the ACT Reading, the things that you need to do when encountering the passages include: finding the narrator’s/character’s opinions/emotions that are shown in the passage, find things such as lists, and doing ‘‘passage mapping’’ where you underline the main idea of each paragraph. By doing this, my Reading score went up 8 points to a 30 which I was stoked.
Another tip is to not read the questions before reading the passage. That is really just a waste of time.
Another thing is that you need to find which are you best passage(s) and which ones you are most confident in, and to tackle them first. Don’t want to waste 15 minutes on your worst passage when you could be using up 8 minutes on your best.