<p>My son has been working really hard preparing for his ACT test. He has seen large gains in all of the areas of the test other than the reading section. He has had some modest gains in reading but still needs to improve. He is scoring between 22-26 in reading and really needs to get it consistently into the 28 range. It will still be his lowest section, but right now the reading is pulling his composite score down.</p>
<p>He has worked through the Princeton Review book and the Real ACT book. He still runs out of time on the reading section but not the others. He has also worked with a tutor a bit on the test as a whole. I think the issue may be that his vocabulary is not as strong as it should be and he is not a speedy reader. I wonder if at this point he should start looking at some strategies to eliminate answers so he can more effectively guess. </p>
<p>Would love any suggestions you have. Thanks so much!</p>
<p>First of all, I think that vocabulary is definitely not the issue on ACT. So, I strongly recommend your son not to waste time studying it or trying to decipher weird words that may pop up on the test. Whenever they appear, he should just ignore them and continue reading, trying just to get the overall sense of the phrase. In the rare questions that ask about the meaning of one particular word, the meaning is never the “typical” one, so knowing the word previously would’t help anyway.
My best advice to manage the time constraints - paradoxically as it may seem - is to carefully read the entire passage, paying attention to as many details as possible! It takes about 4.5 to 5 minutes for a medium/slow reader to read the entire passage, and so you are left with about 3 min to answer the 10 questions. It may seem too little but, once you have really understood the passage, all question will look ridiculously easy.</p>