Your child's ACT strategies?

shawbridge
Thu, 24 Apr 2014 02:49:57 +0000

@YouAreAllAwesome‌, here is a quote from @carolyn:

It’s quite simple: buy the real SAT book put out by the college board (there’s one for the new SAT). Do not use any other prep book as they do not use “real” questions. Only the College Board’s own book does.

Break the tests in the book down into separate sections. Take each section one at a time. Do not worry too much about time in the beginning. After you have finished each test, review the answers and the explanations carefully for each problem, even the ones you got right. This last is VERY important as you want to make sure you know WHY you got each problem right so you can start to recognize patterns and similar questions.

Repeat the process with each section and every part of the book. Then retake the tests again, and do the same.

My daughter did this on her own for the reading and writing sections. She worked with a tutor using this method for the math. Her scores stayed the same for writing, but rose 80 points for both the reading and writing sections over her PSAT scores last October.

She also took a princeton review type class, but found it so useless that she didn’t go back after the first three sections (and too late to get a refund!). She felt it was more useful to spend the time studying on her own.

By the way, the College Board has a service where you can get your essays for the Real book tests scored online. I believe it is about $60 to register for this service. The same service also provides detailed explanations for each question in the real books. Don’t have the exact link but look on the College Board site under “test prep” and you should find it.

Here is a link to a downloadable explantion, presumably by xiggi himself but I’m not sure about that: Xiggi Advice;

We didn’t find any real difference between the prep needed for SAT and ACT.