I’ve practiced the act math section twice and both times I’ve received a 23. I always make a couple careless mistakes before the last 20 questions but I always do so bad on the last 20. Any tips on stopping careless mistakes and getting the last bunch right?
Find out which problems you’re getting wrong and research their underlying concepts. Do you need to know the unit circle for number 47? Do you need to know the 3-4-5 triangle? The 1-1-√2 triangle? The unit circle? Find out how to work them and try to connect questions if you’re hellhound on studying. “The last bunch” are usually the harder ones and require some sometimes require Pre-Calc concepts.
For the careless error questions . . . try to improve accuracy . . . ? For the ACT, I personally would not recommend trying to double-check, so your best bet would be to find patterns in the practice tests and try to find similarities to where you can use short-cuts to find the answers. Remember that every question - even the hard ones that look like they require intensive calculator use - can be solved without a calculator by means of some kind of trick. Find those tricks to eliminate long calculations.
EDIT: With that being said, if your wallet is digging a hole in your pocket and you’ve got $90-$100 laying around, I cannot recommend the TI-84 CE enough, especially if you think math can be fun. Experimenting with this will help you through some very difficult concepts (as will Wolfram Alpha), and it can be used on the ACT, SAT, AP Calculus AB/BC, and AP Statistics exams. The colored screen will make it easier and more enjoyable to navigate, and its graphing capabilities may help with both understanding and quickly computing, for example, equalities in equations.
For the record, I did not study intensively as I suggest (wish I had in hindsight). My math score never really fluctuated, with my math score only around a 29 - 32 (730 on one attempt on SAT) throughout all of my attempts. Needless to say, I regret that. Regardless, my answer is not one of a top-scoring student (31 ACT, 1450 SAT), so there might be better authorities on this. Just saying. Also, best of luck!
Thank you! I’ll dig deeper into the questions and find out why I got them wrong and maybe even learn a couple new concepts. I’ll also look into the TI-84 CE. I currently have the TI-30Xa
I scored a 35 on the math section, so I have a fairly good amount of knowledge here.
The math section was made harder by the ACT since last year I think because way too many kids scored high. The questions after 40 are not necessarily difficult but requires you to apply various bits. You need to know formulas; they can be found online. Know all the geometry rules; these are really helpful for picture questions and some other word problems.
As for the pre-40 questions, it all comes down to practice. Two tests don’t count as practice; you need to take over 10 tests, which is what I did. There are several books on Amazon that should help you out.