Book Excerpt: The Common Sense Guide to the ACT

Oxford Tutors is starting an academic publishing imprint: Project Socrates Press. Over the coming months, we’ll be releasing guides packed with straightforward, concrete advice for acing standardized tests and common academic challenges. One of our first books is The Common Sense Guide to the ACT, by Lindsay Glabman and Elisabeth Gray. An excerpt is featured below.

Math Technique: Graffiti Your Test

As you take the ACT, be sure to write all over your test. Your test booklet is yours. No one besides you will ever see it. So mark it up! Underline. Draw pictures. Circle important words in the question and jot down your calculations neatly, and your accuracy will skyrocket! Here are three of the most important ways you should write on your test:

Annotate the Question—Your calculations may be perfect on the Math section, but you won't get credit if you solve the wrong problem. Before you do any math, you must understand the directions. That's why you need to read every question on the Math section as if you were in a Reading section and highlight the key words. The same applies for Science questions. If you underline the key terms, numbers, and units in every question, they will reveal where to hunt for data in the charts and graphs.

Draw your Shapes—Whenever a Math question references a shape that is not shown, you must draw it! Seeing the shape on your page is more likely to trigger that "aha" moment of knowing how to solve the problem and will also make it more likely that you avoid careless errors along the way. When a shape is provided, be sure to label it with all the given information.

Write Down Every Step—Even though all the questions on the ACT are designed to be solvable by hand, a calculator is a great timesaving tool on this section. However, if you go straight to your calculator and start pressing buttons without writing down your work, you'll have no way of catching the error if you accidentally hit a wrong key. And if you don't show your work, you'll have no way to check it without solving the problem all over again. This technique includes writing down the given information and pertinent formulas on your workspace. Yes, we know this is a timed test and writing down your steps takes time, but careless calculation errors usually occur when students take shortcuts. In these cases, by skipping steps to save time, all the time they spent on the problem was wasted. So take an extra second or two to organize your work on the page and get an extra point or two on the section!