Raise my ACT score?

Test Preparation ACT Preparation
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<p>Hey everyone!</p>

<p>Just a little backround...</p>

<p>3.95 GPA, A top trumpet player in Oakland County, MI, Varsity Cross-Country, Soccer, Track, and Football. Track Captain. Active in my church. I have about 300 hours of community service, I'm a VFW and military funeral bugler, student council rep, NHS member, interact member, optimist member, I love being involved, and I'm a real friendly guy.</p>

<p>Ultimately, I want to win a Naval ROTC scholarship and become a Nurse Anesthetist or Physician's Assistant. I want to get into one of these programs straight out of high school, it would really make things easier! However, my ACT is a little low. How can I raise it?</p>

<p>On my first practice test my composite was a 24. I got a 26 English, 18 Math, 30 Reading, and 22 Science. After taking some practice tests, I'm at about a 28 composite. 32 English, 24 math, 31 Reading, and a 24 Science. I'm really concerned about math. What did you do to raise your math?</p>

<p>**What can I do to get my score up to a 30? I feel like I can do this, I just need to review. </p>

<p>Thanks so much everyone!</p>

<p>**The schools I'm looking at are Michigan, Purdue, Penn State, Pittsburgh, Marquette, Penn, Brown, and Memphis.</p>

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<p>Wow! thats amazing reading and english lol! I started off with a 22 on english so i feel your pain. Well I got a 27 on math at first on practice tests so what i did was first go over the whole practice test and how I could get ALL the math questions right. secondly i made sure i didnt think abstract the answer is down there! sometimes i just plug in numbers to get the answer than solve a long problem… lastly what i did after all that was use this. [ACT</a> SparkNotes Test Prep: ACT Math Subjects](<a href=“SparkNotes: Today's Most Popular Study Guides”>SparkNotes: Today's Most Popular Study Guides)
its a sparknotes that covers eevrything in math! I took out a notebook and wrote down all the forumals and strategies on the sparknotes site that i was unfamilar with. it was about 9 pages. I figured out i sucked on geometry so that site helped a lot. next time i took a practice test i got a 31 and thats only because i couldnt finish the last five questions. timing is crucial dont spend a lot of time on questions, becuase the last few are made to KILL your score. thats what i regret not doing. so make sure to do all that and then add practice tests with timing</p>

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<p>Alright sweet, thanks for the help man!</p>

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<p>What did you get on each subscore for the math sections? The first time that I took the ACT (no prep), I scored an 18 on every subsection but a 13 on geometry, which killed my scaled math score. Luckily for me though, this made it very possible to prepare for the test because I knew that I only needed to study in the geometry section. I recommend that you look to see where you can improve on in those sections. Seeing that you have a low math score (from CC’s standars at least!), I’d recommend that you buy a ACT prep book. The price range is generally $10-20, more likely to be $20. </p>

<p>This book will help you improve greatly. It’s even more helpful that you score highly on reading, as that is, in my opinion, the hardest test to improve on. Look at the subsections that you got on English; there is rhetoric (improvements), and grammatical. Grammar is easy to improve on (it just takes some time, depending on how well it is already), and rhetoric is simply knowing the ACT makers. By this, I mean that they create several sentences on every test that follow the exact same pattern. I’ll let the prep. book help with that though.</p>

<p>It seems that math is the most comprehensive in seemingly all of the ACT prep books. Note that if you buy Barron’s book, you can expect some insanely difficult questions that aren’t likely to appear on the test (although it does have its benefits!). The math section on the ACT has stopped several of my friends from achieving their optimum score because it orders the questions on a scale of difficulty. The first questions are normally simple algebra (If X+5=10, what is X?), while the latter questions are much more difficult. Without knowing this, many people double check their answers on the earlier questions, then find themselves without time on the final portion of it.</p>

<p>You’ve done well on the reading section. I would only be able to recommend that you see what you’ve missed on the practice tests and improve from their. </p>

<p>The science section is possible to improve to a point simply by learning the test format better. The ACT likes to include several formulas and, on occasion, graphs that you’ll never refer to during a passage. Generally, if there’s an esoteric vocabulary word, then you won’t need to know it. (You’ll need to know exoteric words though, precipitation is an example of a word you may need to know. Spectrometer, however, is not.) There are normally between 1-3 questions that test you on your outside knowledge, the rest can be found in the passage or by making inferences from it. Of course, knowing the subject already certainly makes the test easier!</p>

<p>Best of luck!</p>