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Most people find themselves in a bit of a panic about this test, so they usually need a bit of guidance as to how to take it. I have always prided myself on being a fantastic standardized test taker, and even as far back as high school when I took the ACT was I able to give advice to other students as to how they show prepare themselves for taking the test. My experiences with standardized testing, the plethora of them I have been made to take throughout my educational career made sure I am still fresh on how to take such exams.
My own preparations for the GRE, the ACT's older cousin, have led my study of vocabulary to be more than sufficient to work with ACT students, even though it is not my main area of work. A huge area of help in the verbal section comes from process of elimination, an idea that students may not be taught. We need to actually study the choices and make sure that anything we select makes sense, be it an analogy or an insertion into a paragraph. Try reading the line to yourself for the possible choices, and see what has the same (of different meaning if the question asks such) meaning as the word/phrase that is being replaced. Other time when you are asked to add a line to an essay and decide best where it fits, just try all the places if the line analysis doesn't seem to work and see which sounds best. Of course, if you can look at the line and recognize it as an introduction line, insert it at the beginning, but that's a best-case scenario, and I prefer to help students with the questions where the answer isn't as obvious. Some of the favorite English questions are "did the preceding essay" questions. Examples of these questions, such as "The student was to write an essay about ___. Did the preceding essay fulfill that assignment?" are the easiest way to teach students about them. In fact, in my teaching experience, students learn about twice as much from examples as they do from other lectures or book reading, so those are key in test preparation. Parts of the test that I do pride myself in knowing are the reading and written sections, and this is where that history major I picked up comes in handy. Countless classes of reading sections of texts and writing essays have made my understanding of this section as complete as possible, and transmitting my understanding is a task I look forwards to undertaking.
Now, we come to the math and science sections. The science section seemed to be a smash up of the math and reading sections - usually charts, data or a paragraph explaining some topic and the student is left to decipher the answer. Data analysis is something rarely learned in high schools, but I believe all it takes is some getting used to, and more importantly, getting over the first-time discomfort. This section's questions usually are more along the lines of a wild-card section, and students get worried that they haven't had enough science classes to cover everything they need to know. Now, finally, my favorite section, the math section. This is a big student freak-out section. Students believe that there is "now way I can know all this stuff" but in reality, that's simply not true. In fact, most students have already learned all the math they need for this test in their classes, and just don't realize that the ACT is not testing them on new material. Once again though, the biggest help in this section is examples, examples, examples. And I don't mean that I do the problems over and over and you sit and watch. No, I mean I do one, talk you throughout it, and then you proceed to do a couple very similar to it. The testing people are not that clever in coming up with their questions; a lot of them are very similar repeats, so if we can hit these types hard, so when the student sees them they know enough so they can work through the problems they don't immediately recognize, I think my goal in tutoring the ACT would have been completed.
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