<p>Hey everyone!</p>
<p>I'm an Australian international sitting the April ACT.</p>
<p>I did my first ACT Practice Test this morning and scored:
English: 29, Maths: 36, Reading: 35, Science: 36 --> Composite: 34
My English Subscores were UM: 35/40 and RH: 30/35 --> English Raw: 65/75</p>
<p>Unfortunately, in Australia (at least in my experience) we stop learning about grammar and punctuation in primary school so I'm clearly a bit out of practice. :S</p>
<p>I'm happy with my other results but my English score is dragging my Composite down dramatically. I'm ordering in an ACT Study Guide but for the moment I don't really have any other resources. Do you know of anything that would help me improve my English mark?</p>
<p>Thanks :)</p>
<p>Trust me - American schools aren’t any better. We stopped learning grammar and punctuation before we started.</p>
<p>First off, it’s not a huge deal if you can’t get your composite up (as a 34 is still amazing, and isn’t much different from a 36), but you’re definitely in a good position to improve (it’s much easier to improve on a 29 than, say, a 33).</p>
<p>What I’d suggest is taking a few more practice English sections and looking at all the questions you’ve missed. Often, the questions people miss tend to have a common theme (e.g. comma usage, subject-verb agreement). If you can identify the types of questions that you commonly miss, you can then learn the corresponding grammar or writing conventions from your ACT Study Guide (or even by Googling it).</p>
<p>I’d guess from your score that you don’t guess very often - if at all - on the English section. However, it’s probably worth reading over the suggestions for guessing on English in the book you’ve purchased. There are also lots of them floating around on this site.</p>
<p>Thanks for the advice RedSeven :)</p>
<p>Our failing grammar and punctuation really is an indictment on modern education. Hopefully, it shouldn’t be too hard to fix up though.</p>
<p>Thanks for the confidence boost! I’ve been on these forums fairly often recently and looking at all the super high scores of the posters was somewhat daunting; it’s nice to know I’m at least in the ballpark (I’m aiming for the top-tiers)
Actually, if you want to check out the rest of my application I made a “chances” thread a while ago: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/1074286-australian-internationals-ivy-chances.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/what-my-chances/1074286-australian-internationals-ivy-chances.html</a></p>
<p>Yeah, I think some more practice English sections should probably help me analyse my problem areas. As for guessing, well I didn’t leave any answers blank (as there is no penalty I didn’t see a need to). Saying that, I also finished each section with at least 15 minutes to spare so I probably should have gone over my answers. :P</p>