More detailed: 21 ACT 3.5 GpA

wayred
Thu, 14 Nov 2013 21:20:21 +0000

i understand about the money issue, but it might be worth it to complete a full 4 years at MSU. yeah your ACT is low, but i had around the same cumulative GPA as you, you pretty much got a 3.5 which is great. i know a lot of people say that essays come in at #3 or 4 on the priority list for the admissions council but you should work hard on it and form a well articulated essay.

so do it, write an essay that inspires you not one that shows off your wishes and dreams. i would write one that makes you feel like you’re gonna work great at MSU. submit the app and study up for the ACT. your reading score is not so far behind.

math is not that hard to bring up, if you have an act prep book (i used barrons and princeton review) just take a whole saturday to go through the lessons portion, this is the part that doesnt have practice tests. when it shows you an example, do it separately on paper and go through it with the lesson, then do the little practice problems they have at the end of each lesson.

writing is a hard one, all the teachers tell to write an essay with three parts, intro, body and conclusion. the body should have three supported arguments in it. but i never followed that , i just answered the question and explained i would practice this and ask an English teacher to look it over and ask them how well you did, a great ap lit teacher is awesome for this. but English teachers are great for it also. i’m sure that they will be more than willing to help.

for the english portion, go over the grammar lessons in the prep book. learn your punctuation well, especially commas and semicolons and colons. and the use of and. read two news articles, then start answering the questions in the prep book where you have to identify what is wrong with the sentence.

science is a tough one, i know kids who got 34’s overall but did just a bit better than you did on science, 27’s and 28’s. i suggest taking out one practice test of science, don’t answer any questions, just look at all the information given for a question and figure out how to read the graph or chart represented first. Remember that questions get harder as you go along in the science section. So you have 4 or 5 sub portions of science, where each is on a different topic and has around 6 or 7 questions to it. the first three are always the easiest ones to answer, if you find it hard to answer the last question, as in you have no frickin clue, move on and get to the next sub portion for those easy first three. i don’t remember the specifics about how many questions and sub portions because i last took the test in 2011. go on line, you can find what each sub portion will be about, like the first is a histogram, the second is a lab experiment, the third is about competing scientific papers.etc.

good luck on reading, i would just take all the practice tests you can for reading.

so right now, i think your best shot at raising your score is improving math and english. i suggest a three session study. first session is math go through all of the stuff, then take a full length practice test without stopping to look anything up. so just like the real exam but no time limit. after the that go on to english, again, grammar and punctuation rules. try out the trick about reading a few news articles first. but first go over rules and examples, then do the reading, then do a practice test-full length- with no time limit.

sessions could take a whole two day weekend or just 6 hours. it depends on how focused you are. i suggest going home friday night and doing all your hw then getting up early on saturday, eating well, and then diving in. hopefully you can do both the math and the english within a two day weekend.

DO NOT GET DISCOURAGED about not being able to do a few problems or not scroing high on the practice tests, just go over those problems, redo them and check why you had gotten them wrong if you havent figured it out already. if you got it wrong and then had to check because you couldnt figure it out, then redo the problem even if you know how to get the answer. sometimes prep books can be annoying and they will tell you how to elminate three answers instead of finding the right one, in math it is usually better to just calculate it correctly. but elimination is incredibly usefull if you are at the end of the test with three questions to go and only have like 30 seconds on the clock.

session two is just science, could probably do this on a day where you dont have much hw. so just like i said, interpret the info given and the reading and i really suggest looking up what the sub portions are most likely going to be like. after interpreting the graphs an reading go ahead and start answering the questions. but since there are sub portions, answer and check and redo and think through by one sub portion at a time.

when i say intrepret graph, i mean look at the axis or the column or row and identify what it is actually saying. like it might be a graph with time in seconds on the x axis and temperature in degrees celsius on the y axis. and a squiggly that start at the top and always goes down as you go left to right. suppose this squiggle never goes up at any point, so like a squiggle stair case. this all means that the temperature decreased over time and never rose at any point in time.

so far, we have session one over the weekend, session two sometime in the first half of the week. and finally session three-the full length test. each prep book has atleast two full length practice tests, use the first one to practice for sessions one and two, the second for a full length timed test. if you have three practice, use the first for the sessions 1 and 2, the second as split up but timed, and the third as a full length timed test as if you are actually taking the exam. use stop watch with an alarm and set the times to the proper limit for each test.

for the second practice test, in case you have three, i said to have it split up but timed. so session three is going to be the weekend again, do the same thing, all HW on friday night and wake up early but with enough sleep. the goal for that saturday is to complete a full practice test, but you can take huge breaks in between sub sections of the test. so set the time and take math (or whatever test you’re supposed to take first) and tear our the bubble sheet and actually fill it in, not just circling answers, you can also find the bubble sheet online and print them off which is nicer because then you don’t have to use the weak, crappy prep book sheet which tears each and doesnt erase well. then after the time goes off, go back and look over the questions you had trouble with, figure them out. check all the answers and work through the ones you got wrong and redo them. then take a break before moving on to the next test. continue in this fashion till done with a whole test minus the writing portion, although you could go ahead and do that too, which i recommend. get some good sleep saturday night, wake up sunday. and do a full length exam-no breaks, no looking up answers after a sub section, no working through the tough problems again. time it, 4 hours about. and again, add the writing portion if you can, just write an essay from old ACT essay questions or whatever is in the prep book. after that, take sunday afternoon to just grade your full exam and i am confident that if you stayed focused while studying, you’ll have a pretty nice score. you wont be able to grade the writing portion.

maybe sometimes between sessions 1 and 3 go to the english teacher and show her/him your practice essay and the ACT essay question, so there is a session 1.5 where you take thirty minutes after school to write out an ACT essay. remember what i told you about the ACT essay. then show those to a teacher the next day after school or whenever you have time.

k so this is an 8 day study program, you can split up the sessions over a few weeks if you wanted to, but i recommend just going hard at it for those 8 days, though you might be a different kind of study person from me so do what suits you. all of this is just advice. just remember to do practice quizzes and problems until the night before the night before the test. the night before the test should be just touch up stuff, maybe a few practice mini quizzes but ultimately you just want to be calmed and relaxed and feel ready for the next day. good luck, i hope you do well regardless if you do the 3 sessions or not and i hope you get in to State, it’s pretty nice here.