I’m currently a high school senior and I plan on attending a performing art’s college in California starting next fall. While I’m there, I plan on taking my Gen Ed’s online by using a partnership program through a community college. In order to be able to skip the remedial courses, you have to get a certain score on your SAT/ACT in order to do that. On my last test in October, I scored 21 C, 24 E, 22 M, 18 R, and 21 S. That was my second time taking it after doing rigorous amount of prep to the point where I pretty much had no social life for a while. The first time I took it was April last year. I scored 17 C, 19 E, 18 M, 13 R, and 17 S.
I’ve met the required score benchmark for English, math I need 23 and since I keep scoring 24-25 in practice tests, I’m not too concerned with that. I did loads of reading prep beforehand and I never scored any higher than 16 in any of the practice tests I’ve taken recently, so I’m guessing my 18 was lucky?
Basically, my problem is I don’t really understand a single question. I try to skim read the passages (not really understanding a single aspect to any of them) and I get to the questions and all the answers sound like they could be correct, so I take random guesses and hope I get more than 25% of them correct. Out of the two ACT tests I’ve taken, I’ve really only knew the answer 100% to about 2 or 3 questions. The rest I just randomly guess on due to crunched time, which is not even close to enough time for me.
I’ve always had problems with understanding texts on paper, and academics as a whole, but I need help with beginning to wrap my head around this section. I want to get a solid 21 so I can skip the remedial reading course (which to be honest, is probably a more appropriate level for me) and not have to fork over an extra $2,000-$3,000 I already don’t have in the first place — since I come from a low-income family and I’m the first from my family to go to college, the costs are high enough as it is along with my financial aid.
I know there are a lot of members about my age in this forum that claims to have scored 34 and above on this section (and the whole test) after just rolling out of bed and splashing some cold water on their face, and I come from a top 10 high school of my state, and I rank in the bottom 20% in my school as far as ACT scores (bottom 3% in reading)
Sorry I kind of went off on a tangent, but I’m obviously doing something wrong? I’ve put in a fair amount of time prepping for the other sections that I’ve seen improvement on, but I’m barely seeing any improvement on the reading section even though I’m putting in twice as much time as I did for the other sections.
Any tips/tricks would be greatly appreciated
Thanks!