ACT Tips and Tricks that ACTUALLY work in 2024 (i just got a 36)

all right y'all are busy so let me cut straight to the chase my name is rishab I got a 36 on the ACT with minimal studying and My Philosophy is to help you guys work smarter not harder and so let's get into it you can trust me because I'm a senior I actually took this test unlike the bunch of old people on YouTube trying to tell you what to do with the ACT way back with old formats also I'm not trying to sell you a course like this guy was and so you can trust me this video isn't even monetized so don't worry about any of that and finally also I'm going to give you actionable high impact high value tips what I'd want to hear from a YouTube video not generic advice that you're gonna get from prep Company videos like Princeton Review or whatever so let's get into part number one which is on test taking tips so test taking tips first there's a literal hack which is to guess e and K at the end of the day you're most likely going to have to guess on at least one question on the ACT in fact it's probably way more than one question um and so don't guess B or C now there's a brief paragraph I have on here explaining why but in addition to this towards towards the end of the math section the math section has 60 Questions and so at the end they give really hard like math questions last 10 tend to be pretty tough and so they know that a bunch of students guess on those towards the end when they're running out of time and if they put the probabilities evenly then every student's going to get 20 of them right because there's five answer choices or whatever and so if you just guess C for all of those last ten you're gonna get uh 20 of those problems right so you're going to get two extra points on the act or whatever but they know that so they have designed the test so that in the last 10 math questions they put less B's and C's because they know that students tend to Guess that answer Choice more commonly which is really weird so it's actually a hack to guess Ian k and I'm not just saying this I literally researched and I looked into the stats of the ACT test and this is actually true so when you're practicing doing practice tests and taking the actual test guest answer Choice e and K and so let's get into the next thing which is to guess in a line so this is kind of adding on to what I just was saying previously the E and K and so you're going to want to guess like let's say you missed the last five you're running out of time guess in a straight line because that maximizes your chance of getting it correctly because the ACT has it in a distributed probability so don't jump around in your guesses unless of course you're able to quickly eliminate a couple answer choices then you want to do that but if you can just guess in the straight line for the distribution but most likely or most hopefully you won't have to guess at all and so the reason behind this is because I'm Gonna Save you guys Time by bubbling at the end now this was a test tip that I discovered right before I took my act and I've been doing it ever since for my AP test for school tests for like any other test that I take Bubble at the end with Scantron so what that means is you're going to get a test booklet and you're also going to get the Scantron which you have to bubble in on and so rather than going in your Scantron reading the thing and then bubbling and then reading the next thing and then bubbling that distracts your brain because you have to go back and forth and that's less efficient have you ever noticed like if you split the task so that you're doing the same thing again and again like you're making a dove a ball of dough again and again and again versus making the ball of dough and then going to the oven and putting it in you first make all of the balls and then you put it in the oven and so similarly that's such a bad analogy but similarly on the ACT I want you guys to bubble in at the end so first solve all the problems in your workbook mark it up do whatever you need to underline in your workbook and then at the end when you have like five minutes left for the section go back and bubble it in on your Scantron that will save you time okay now don't study the night before this is again a general test taking tip for part one um and if you do I will be angry at you it doesn't help I remember when I was taking my act all my friends were like studying the night before and it kind of resulted in a little bit of pressure for me like should I be studying but in the end I just went with my gut and I was like okay I'm just gonna chill I'm gonna relax relax my head I'm gonna meditate do whatever I need to do don't study the night before because it's not going to help but what you can do is on the morning of the test read out loud for five minutes so take your favorite art of glad to know New York Times or take a random book in your house and just pick it up while you're in the card being driven or drove to your test if your parents are driving you or whatever just read the book out loud for five minutes and then read the book in your head for five minutes that's like a 10 minute reading warm-up and I found that this is actually really helpful because the ACT test starts with the English section and so with the English English section being like a native English speaker um I I'm assuming that most of you guys watching this video are also going to be having English as your first language and so being it being that way when I'm reading the ACT section it kind of just I have like a gut feeling of like what's kind of correct and I can kind of sound it out in my head for like 90 of the questions on the English section and so English is the first section on the ACT test and that's kind of where you're sounding Out things and I like say stuff in my head and I'm pretty sure if you guys have taken it practice English section for the ACT you will be doing the same thing and so read out loud on the morning of and then read in your head that will help you kind of get in the mode of reading a little bit and then also on the test itself let's say you bomb the English section and you're like okay now like I'm on math and you're like kind of demotivated and you're like okay I don't know what to do now like whatever I just bombed this test I'm gonna give up don't give up if you bombed a certain section you might not have actually done as bad as you did because uh like let's say you got you you feel like you kind of bombed it but you actually got like a 35 on that section you can still the other sections can still scare you and 35 is not bad score at all like 34 33 whatever you're going for right if you got slightly lower you can make up for it on the other section so just keep doing your best throughout the entire test if you got distracted on a passage don't give up on the reading section keep going for the entire test and I know this seems obvious but I feel like this is just something kind of like psychological that you're like once you bomb a certain section you're just like you become kind of less motivated and you do worse on the next sections don't be that way just refresh your mind and keep going and also some colleges offer super scoring will there where you can take the test again and then let's say you do better on that specific section but do maybe even worse on the other sections it doesn't matter because then you can super score so just try your best on all the sections all right part number two of this video which is section specific tips okay so for Section specific tips I wanted to start out with reading because reading just happens to be the most commonly searched thing for ACT people are always looking how to improve their reading and math so with reading Skip by passage type this was a huge Improvement for me like I'm pretty sure this is why I got a 36 on the reading and it's because I went to the science passages first as kind of a science guy who's taken like science AP classes like AP Bio AP chem physics if you've taken those sorts of classes you're probably more familiar with graphs charts and kind of dense science reading and so in the reading section when it went to the Natural Sciences and uh the they have a natural sciences passage so I always just went and skipped to that passage and started with that passage in fact on my test I started with the prose fiction passage because that was first on my test and I was like okay I'm getting nowhere with this so I literally wasted five minutes on the pro section Pros fiction passage skip to the Natural Sciences and still manage to finish the entire thing early and get a 36 on reading so I just recommend you know start with your strongest one if you read a bunch of fiction books and you find that you're like good on prose fiction in your practice test um then you know you're going to want to start with prose fiction and likewise like you just take a practice test for reading and that will really help you identify like okay I'm more strong for this passage or it's just easier for you to read that because you're coming into the test and you're like like now I have to read so many passages and so it's better to start with the thing you're more familiar with so you get into that flow um and the rest of the test will hopefully be a little bit easier so now the second thing I have is science science is honestly free and it's not easy but I'd say science is the section where you can get a 36 and improve up science is a section where if you practice it you can get way better than you can so if you've taken AP Bio or another AP science class if you do the science section um it should already be a little bit more comfortable for you because you've read those types of dense passages and worked on those frqs with those random graphs and stuff but just attack the graphs and charts they try to make it confusing by putting in random vocab words they don't expect you to know those vocab words they just put it in to make it dense and harder to understand so attack all the graphs all the tables even if you have no idea what the passage is saying attack science I promise you you can get an improvement in science if you keep just attacking those and working on science um now going on to English I just have one tip here and it's to be concise and so I feel like um I was pretty strong with English going into the test already but the redundancy was kind of annoying like it would always seem as if there's a couple answer choices that might be correct and so I learned that for the shorter uh the shorter answers those tend to be correct so if there's a more concise answer they might be testing to see your skills with wordiness and conciseness for writing and grammar so try to choose the shorter one as it has a higher chance of being correct if it's like less redundant if it's the same information just worded in a longer way the shorter one is more likely to be correct all right now on to math one tip you probably already know this but plug and chug like you have a calculator for a reason try to plug in numbers like substitute the variables with numbers and see what works out just keep that in mind guys plug and chug plug and chug all right now next math section is 60 and 60. this is a timing piece and this was like critical for me on my math section so I'd highly recommend doing the easy questions fast at the beginning so the there's a bunch of random sites and videos out there and they tell you to start with the hard questions on the math section which makes literally zero sense to me if you start with the hard questions you're gonna feel like less motivated to do the easy questions because you're gonna be like oh my God that was so hard I have no idea what I'm doing like I probably just got 5 out of 10 of those last 10 hard math questions right and then you go to the easy ones and you're like wait these are actually way easier so start with the easy questions do like take a practice test that's what I'm going to tell you about at the end like general study tips and one of them is to take a practice test and analyze these specific things about timing and so do the easy questions fast at the beginning don't double check them like one one thing that I did is I read the I did the first like five or ten math questions and then I went back and was like double checking and that was a huge waste of time because I could have instead spent that time working on the harder math problems and and potentially solve those and so do the easy questions first like the first 40 or so try to do those faster because the last 20 last 10 10 are going to be harder all right the next thing this is a random tip that I kind of picked up on after doing like three or four practice acts before taking my my test and so it's this math to Frack so basically on your TI-84 whatever calculator you have they have this math button and so if you press math and then press the thing that says Frack that converts a decimal into a fraction and so I don't know why but like on two of my on one of my practice tests and then on the actual test itself I use this function in it like actually helped it's so useful because if you have some weird like decimal number you press two Frac and it converts into a fraction like 3 over 13. do you know the decimal for that of course you don't and I didn't know it either but I pressed two Frac and then it converts it into a decimal and it's or if it converts into a fraction from the decimal form that I had got when plugging into my calculator and it's just really useful so familiar familiarize yourself with your calculator and with that function specifically because for whatever reason I found that it helped me get a free point on one of the questions all right finally part three general study tips okay so for this section um I want to start out by saying you don't need to buy classes or buy courses I've had friends who have taken these types of classes and courses and I've basically heard that they don't really help at the end of the day these just help you stay on track like oh I have to take a weekly test they're forcing me to go to the test center practice in my in whatever in my community and then and sit there and take a test you can do that at home so all the test prep you need is free online and then second this book here that you're seeing right now a bunch of people have this book I got an act practice book from the library used it for like an hour and then realized that it's not really that helpful and the reason why is because these books are not officially act questions they're not actual act questions they're written by people who are trying to make money from you to buy their book and so what do you think they're going to do they're going to try to make those passages harder sometimes or in some cases on the diagnostic test make it easier or try to like make you spend money because they they want you to think that you're worse than you actually are I got a Kaplan act book and from the library and it was like the passages on reading were so much more difficult cool I thought I was going to get like a like a way worse score on the reading and then on the actual test I got a 36. so don't trust these books instead I'll put you guys on this thing right here full length Real ACT tests there's 88 of them online and this page recently got taken down because the ACT wants people to spend money on buying their courses but you can use the way back machine and so I put a link in the pinned comment section of this video for all of these practice length tests do however many you think you need to do I'd recommend just you know taking it and seeing what your score is and then taking another one and analyzing those things on the reading English math science section like what I kind of told you to do to practice and also learn the timing and the very last thing I think somehow this slide got skipped so I'm heading back here let me put you guys on some this life hack which is to either wake up early or jump in a cold shower on the morning of your test this will wake up your brain and make you feel refreshed and make make you do better on the test I don't know why but it just works so if you are brave enough take a cold shower or if you're not that brave at least wake up early so those are my tips and so make sure to subscribe right now because I need internet clout also comment test taking tips in the comment section below like this video again liking and subscribing it literally takes one second of your time so please do it and bye-bye

Channel: Rishab Jain

Views: 69,980

Keywords: act tips, act math tips, act test tips, act tips 2022, reading tips, act reading tips, act english tips, act science tips, test taking tips, act test day tips, study tips for act, act test tips 2022, act test tips math, act practice tips, act guessing tips, act tips and tricks, day before act tips, act science top tips, act test tips reading, act test tips english, how to get a 36 on the act, how to get a perfect score on the act, how to get a 36 on act

Id: wGvQYA5TpMw

Length: 14min 11sec (851 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 13 2022