Are you hoping to raise your ACT score as much as possible…without studying too for ages? I mean, who isn’t—but some of you might literally be down to just one or two weeks before your test day. The secret efficiency trick, in my experience, is to focus on learning strategies that apply to a wide variety of questions rather than just memorizing content that will only be tested in a few questions and thus earn you fewer points.
So that's exactly what today’s post brings you: the 12 most important tips and tricks for today’s ACT (as in, the ACT you will be taking in 2024 and the first several months of 2025…before the ACT’s format changes). These hacks have been developed and perfected by me, Kristina Semos, the founder of Ivy Lounge Test Prep® and personal tutor to hundreds of students who have gotten perfect scores on the ACT and SAT. I know this test like the back of my hand….but I also believe in working smart, not hard.
Shall we?
ARTICLE CONTENTS
1. Watch this article as a video
2. English
a. How to combine two complete clauses
b. The subject never comes after a preposition
c. If you see a lot of long answer choices, choose the short one
d. Should you choose the specific or the vague answer choice?
3. Math
b. When you're running out of time, cherry-pick
4. Reading
a. Answer big-picture questions last
c. The best paired passage strategy
5. Science
a. Don’t read the passages—just start answering questions
b. Use the Castle Method for charts, graphs, tables
6. Conclusion
Watch this article as a video:
Key strategies for the ACT English
How to combine two complete clauses
Although today’s post mostly covers strategy rather than content, there is a SMALL handful of content gold nuggets that will still pay off broadly across the test. The first of these is the biggest punctuation rule that the ACT tests you on: how to combine two complete clauses correctly using punctuation. This is tested a LOT, and therefore worth learning how to do.
(And by the way, this subtopic is probably the biggest chunk of content studying covered in today’s post—it all gets simpler after this. So don’t feel discouraged!)
The five ways to correctly connect two independent clauses with punctuation:
1) Make them two separate sentences with periods.
2) Use a semicolon to link the two clauses. Since the resulting words will form just one sentence, the second complete clause should begin with a lowercase letter.
3) Use a comma, then a FANBOYS coordinating conjunction: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. (What word gets spelled out if you take the first letter from each of these words? Yup, FANBOYS!)
4) Use a colon between the two clauses. Note: you can only use a colon in this situation if the second complete clause explains, clarifies, or answers a question posed by the first complete clause.
5) Use a dash (—). Note: same caveat applies here as in #4!
So, those are the five ways that you can join two complete clauses together correctly. HOWEVER, there are also many ways you can INCORRECTLY join two incomplete clauses—and believe me, the test-makers WILL try to confuse you by including them in the answer choices.
Common mistakes in joining two independent clauses:
1) Putting two complete clauses together without ANY punctuation.
2) Joining two complete clauses with ONLY a comma. (This is known as a “comma splice,” and it’ll send you straight to grammar jail!)
3) Joining two independent clauses with a semicolon (so far so good), THEN adding a FANBOYS conjunction to the second clause. (The FANBOYS conjunction demotes the second complete cause to a dependent one, and semicolons can only join two independent clauses.)
To be sure, there are other ways that you can join complete clauses incorrectly, but these are the main ones that the ACT will use to try to throw you off.
(Interested in a more detailed explanation of this rule, and/or a complete list of every other grammar rule you need to know for the ACT? My ACT Grammar Cram Plan exists for precisely that purpose.)
The subject never comes after a preposition
My second favorite English hack is simply this: in a grammatically correct sentence, the subject will never be found AFTER a preposition, i.e. in a prepositional phrase.
As a reminder: the subject of the sentence is a noun, a pronoun, a proper noun that does the action of the sentence’s verb or is the state of being of the verb. And the subject should match the verb, right? The subject and verb have to agree with each other in terms of whether they’re singular or plural.
Often, ACT English questions will hide a subject within a prepositional phrase. This causes students to get confused about which word is the subject…which causes them to try to make the wrong word agree with the verb….which causes them to miss that question.
For example, if a test question stated:
One of the students ____ great at science.
Would the correct conjugation of the missing verb be “is” or “are”?
Well, let’s recall the main lesson of this section: the subject cannot fall in the prepositional phrase. “Of the students” is a prepositional phrase. Therefore, the word “students” falls in a prepositional phrase—which means it cannot be the subject. So what's left? You have to look earlier in the sentence, BEFORE the prepositional phrase. We’re left with the word “one” as our only possible subject…and the word “one” is, by definition, singular.
So our correct answer would be “One of the students is good at science.” Make sense?
If you see a lot of long answer choices, choose the short one
My third English hack that doesn't take any studying at all is this: if you come across a question with three answer choices that are way longer than a fourth, much shorter answer choice, the answer is probably going to be that shorter answer option.
Usually, these are redundancy questions, meaning that the answer choice is repeating something that’s already been stated in the sentence or in the paragraph, and which is therefore unnecessary. Thus, it's wrong to include it, or it's saying something with passive voice or in a really clunky way that needlessly adds on a bunch of words.
Shorter is usually going to be the correct answer in this case.
Specific vs. vague answers
The only time the previous rule doesn’t apply is when there are three answer options that are very vague and one that is quite specific. In this case, even if the specific answer is a smidgen longer than the vague ones, chances are you should select the specific one that is a correct answer.
ACT Math section: study smart
Unfortunately, there are fewer low-study hacks for Math than for English. For this subject, you mostly have to actually learn content and repeat it—i.e. drill formulas and facts and implement them on practice sets. That said, there are still two big-picture lessons that will dramatically help you.
Easy percents
The reason why I say “easy” percents is because percents become a no-brainer if you know how to automatically translate certain English words into Math “language.”
You no longer have to think about what they mean. You literally just translate. A few examples:
Take the tiny little word “of.” It always means multiply. Literally always.
Or the word “per,” which literally always means divide.
And then if you have one of these—what, how much, some number, a quantity—it's your variable: x, n, whatever you want it to be.
If I have “is, are, was, were, will be”—basically most verbs—that's going to be the equals sign of your equation.
So now let's apply this to percents. The word “percent” breaks down to per, which means “divide,” and cent, which is Latin for “a hundred.” The word therefore literally means “divided by a hundred” or “/100.” If I say “what percent,” well, didn't I just say that the “what” would be my variable, right? So that's literally “x divided by 100” or “x/100.”
If you look at a lot of percent problems, sure, you could think of them as “the part equals the percent over a hundred times the whole” (or “part = (percent/100)*whole”). But it’s even easier if you just translate it.
(By the way, I cover way more Math hacks in my ACT Math Cram Plan. I also include literal cheatsheets for each section of math, and then I include breakdowns of those hacks so you can understand them all.)
When you're running out of time, cherry-pick
This next math trick is key, because a lot of students tend to run out of time towards the end of the math section.
Now, the math section on the ACT progresses from easy to medium to hard. It’s not a perfect science, but its questions are pretty much laid out in order of difficulty level. So a given test’s math section looks something like this:
First 30 questions: easy-ish. That being said, it’s important that you not make careless errors on the ACT’s first 30 questions. These are the easiest wins the exam has to offer, and an easy question is worth the same number of points as a hard question!
Qs 31 through 45 (roughly): medium difficulty. Maybe a given question seems easy, but there's a twist, or maybe it's just transparently a slightly harder question.
The last 10 or so questions of the exam: hardest. This is where things start to get rocky for students who are not dyed-in-the-wool math lovers. It’s here that a lot of students run out of time. Sometimes there's a random easy question peppered into those last questions, but it's just about an upper level math topic. So if you happen to have studied that topic, it's super easy and fast to solve and you win your point no problem. If you haven't learned that math lesson yet, though, you'll think it's hard because you've never seen it before.
For some combination of these reasons, you may approach the end of the exam and realize you’re not going to be able to finish. If you've taken some practice tests and you know this is your tendency, here’s what I suggest: do NOT try to answer the remaining questions in order. Instead, start cherry-picking towards the end. In other words, take a quick glance at each question as you encounter it and assess: have you worked with this topic before? If so, actually answer the question. Ultimately you’ll end up picking just a handful of questions to spend your time answering this way—about three or four.
For the remaining questions that you're not going to have time to solve properly, or that you're going to run out of time before you reach, you're going to pick a letter of the day and select that letter bubble for ALL of them. So in the math section, you might choose the fifth answer, which is E and K alternating. Or you might choose A and F alternating, etc. (E and K tends to be a pretty good bet in general, but honestly, I've seen tests where certain answer choices happen to be good picks on that test, but then not on the next test. So just pick your letter of the day and stay consistent.)
Reading section tips for the ACT
I'll be honest: the best way to really ace the Reading section of the ACT is to go through my process of figuring out YOUR main, tailored-to-you ACT Reading strategy. This can be a trial-and-error process that takes significant time—but then once you figure it out, it's like when Tiger Woods started doing one of his golf strokes from scratch again. He had to tear down his whole technique to build it back up, but once he did, he was an even more brilliant golfer than before. All of a sudden, you’ll just zip through the Reading passages while remaining super accurate.
But….that takes time. You don't have time. You're looking for quick tips and tricks that raise your score with minimal studying. So, this is what I can offer you that will help you with that if you don't want to go through that more time-intensive process. (If you ARE interested in the more thorough and effective approach, my Ultimate ACT Reading Guide walks you through how to find your method, or I can find it FOR you in a one-on-one session.)
Big-picture questions last
In your reading passages, big-picture questions—Qs that ask about the global structure of the whole passage, its main idea, its theme—tend to come first in the stack of questions about a passage.
But riddle me this: do you know the passage best after you've just done your first, cursory read? Or alternatively, if you answer the other, more detailed questions first, wouldn't you maybe start to figure out a little more what this passage is about? The second one, right?
By the time you’ve answered eight or nine questions about a given passage, you’ve learned more about the passage, and answering one of these general questions has become a no-brainer. So by simply switching up the order and tackling the big-picture questions last, you likely save some time (and accuracy). WITHOUT studying more.
Read 5 before, 5 after
My next reading best practice is this: when you have a question that refers to a specific line number(s) from a passage, don't just re-read those line numbers. You need to get a little bit of surrounding context. I like to say, “read five before and five after.”
So if you've got a question that’s asking about two lines from a passage—say, “What’s the XYZ of lines 11 through 12”—well, I would actually return to the passage and read five lines before 11. So, if there’s a sentence that begins around line 6 or 7, I’d revisit that spot and then I would read through 12 plus another sentence or two beyond it, up to five lines below.
This approach will give you essential context you need to answer the Q accurately…because a lot of times, the answer is NOT found in the line itself. It's found in the ruffage around it.
Paired passage strategy
If you’re not familiar, the ACT will typically mix in one “paired passage” along with the other single passages. This means you’re given two shorter passages, A and B, and asked a series of questions about both. There will be a few questions that have to do only with the first passage, a few questions about only the second passage, and then at the end, there will be a few questions that ask about both passages together.
Regardless of your customized ACT Reading strategy, what you should always do with paired passages is read passage A and then answer the passage A questions FIRST. Sometimes they won’t label for you explicitly which passage a given question pertains to, but they DO always clump questions about a given passage together. (So, if the test doesn't specifically say, “the next three questions all have to do with passage A alone,” just start answering the questions until you get to one that doesn't have to do with passage A anymore.)
You’ll then read passage B and continue answering from where you left off, and then all that should remain are the ones about BOTH passages, which will be the last questions in order.
What you WON’T do is approach this cluster of questions by reading both passages first, then answering questions about passage A, which will be confusing because you’ll most recently have read passage B, etc.
This little shuffle of your choreography will save you a lot of time, and, in my experience, a good number of points.
Study fast for the ACT Science
You guessed it: we’ve finally reached the last American College Test section, Science. If you don't want to work with someone one-on-one or use my course, the Ultimate ACT Science Guide, here are just some quick wins for you that don't take too much learning (or relearning).
Don’t read the passages first.
Tip #1: in general, I advise that you just proceed directly to the questions in the science section—don’t read the passages first. Read them ONLY if you truly can't find the answer in the chart, graph, or table. (This works for five of the six Science passages in the section!)
Use the Castle Method for charts, graphs, tables
My second tip relates to any Qs asking directly about a chart, graph, or table. For these questions, I want you to use something I’ve invented that has really benefitted my students: the CASTLE method.
I won't go into detail here because I have a whole other post and video that break down this strategy for you. Check out those links for the goods!
Fork questions
My final favorite Science ACT hack that you can use without hitting the books at all has to do with what I call “Fork Questions” (and yes, I also have a blog post about them here!). What I’m referring to here are those science questions where it asks you something and then provides you with four answers that look like this:
A) “No, because XYZ”
B) “No, because ABC (totally different reason)”
C) “Yes, because XYZ”
D) “Yes, because ABC”
I call this a fork question because technically there are two of them that say “Yes“ and two that say “No,“ but you ALSO have to correctly identify the reason behind the Yes or No.
The trick here is that you’re not even going to try to answer the “yes” or “no” part initially. Instead, you’re first going to look at the reasons and determine which ones are factually correct or factually incorrect based on the charts and graphs accompanying the passage. Cross out the answers that are contradicted or not supported by the charts/graphs. (And believe me, two to three of them will be wrong!)
Sometimes you don't even have to do any work beyond this point because you’ll figure out that the answer HAS to be B because it's the only one supported by a reason that was factually true based on the graph! So that must be the right answer, because you can never have a correct answer based on a wrong reason on this test.
However, if you’re left with two possible answer choices at this stage, chances are they both cite the same “reason.” So, guess what? The ACT Science section just basically spelled out for you the reasoning/process by which you’re going to arrive at the correct answer. So the test basically of did the work for you. In my experience, seeing that reason spelled out will get the wheels turning and set you up to answer the question correctly.
Conclusion
We’ve reached the end of our ACT hacks journey. I hope you’re able to put some of these in your toolkit and use them to ace your upcoming ACT!
However, if these tips merely whet your appetite for studying and point-grabbing, you can check out my online courses and my ebook cram plans, which give you ALL the info you need (and no extra) to get a stellar score on the test. I’ve got a guide for each section of the ACT.
I also do one-on-one work with study plans customized to YOU, if that's more your jam.
