How to Raise Your ACT Score By 3 Points in 30 Minutes

If you want to maximize your score on the ACT, you’re going to want to learn in detail what’s on the test, identify what concepts you’re shaky on and drill them repeatedly, master the overall strategies that work best for you, and then practice practice practice. 

But what if you don’t have time for all that? I mean, the new season of Stranger Things just came out and it’s not going to watch itself! 

That’s where this blog post comes in. Is this a comprehensive guide to the ACT? No. Will this post give you a killer strategy or skill for each of the four sections on this test that will definitely translate into points almost immediately? Yes it will. 

And even if you are looking to do a deeper dive on this test (because you honestly think it’s been downhill since Season 1 of Stranger Things and you just can’t keep investing the time), these strategies and hacks are great things to learn right off the bat, because they all come up A LOT. 

One more thing: Anyone who guarantees you that they can raise your score by a set number of points in a set number of minutes is selling you a bill of goods. All students are different and they work at different paces and get different results. That said, these skills and strategies come up time and again on this test, so if you get them under your belt your score will likely go up considerably more than three points in no time.

So here they are … ten strategies that will boost your score on the ACT.

TWO HACKS FOR ACT ENGLISH

1. SHORTER IS BETTER

What makes good writing? Students sometimes suffer from the misconception that good writing means big shiny words, long sentences, and poetic ideas. While there’s a place for all of that, in general good writing is all about expressing your thoughts with clarity and brevity. 

That is, in as few words as possible. 

And that’s certainly true on the ACT, which strongly prefers short, clear sentences. In fact, the ACT hates anything unnecessary (words, commas, etc), so here’s your rule of thumb: When in doubt, take it out. 

Here’s an example of a typical “shorter is better” problem. Give it a try.

As I looked at all the unfamiliar maps and graphs, I felt very confused.

A. NO CHANGE

B. confused and uncertain.

C. confused without clear understanding.

D. confused like my mind couldn’t make sense of anything.

The answer here is A. Why? Because if you say “confused,” you’re good—you don’t need to say “uncertain” or “without clear understanding” or “couldn’t make sense of anything,” since all those things basically mean the same thing as confused. Dig?

Superhack 1.2

Oftentimes on this test you’ll see a question with four answer choices that are all grammatically correct. On these questions, there will be three longish answer choices and one very short one. Nine times out of ten the short one will be the right answer. Why? Because on the ACT, shorter is better. 

2. LEARN HOW TO USE SEMICOLONS 

Maybe you’ve heard someone explain that the difference between semicolons (;) and periods (.) is that periods separate sentences and semicolons join two more closely related sentences. Whoever told you that is not wrong. But on the ACT, semicolons and periods are THE SAME. They both separate two independent clauses (i.e. clauses that can stand alone as sentences). 

Why ever use a semicolon, you might ask? That’s actually a good question. The author Kurt Vonnegut (he’s great, 5 stars, would recommend) once said that the only reason to use a semicolon is to show that you went to college. The truth is that some authors like to use them and some authors don’t. It’s a choice you get to make about your own writing style. 

But on the ACT, periods and semicolons are THE SAME. They will never make you choose between two answer choices that are identical except for the period or the semicolon. In that case, BOTH answer choices are wrong.

For more ACT English hacks, check out this post.

THREE HACKS FOR ACT MATH

1. PLUG IN YOUR OWN NUMBERS

Let me ask you a question, would you rather do a math question where you have to work with 2 apples, 5 peaches, and 10 oranges, or one where you have to work with x apples, y peaches, and z oranges? I’m guessing that, like me, you’re in the first camp. Well, thanks to the miracle of plugging in, we can turn those daunting-looking abstract questions full of nasty variables into simple and concrete questions with real numbers. 

Here’s how it works. Look at a question like this:

At Jose’s Candy Store, gumdrops are x cents and candy canes are y cents. If Nat gets q gumdrops and w candy canes and pays z dollars, how much change in cents does she receive in terms of x, y, q, w, and z?

Say what? 

That probably, at first sight, looks complicated beyond reason. But watch what happens if we just plug in real numbers for those variables. What numbers should you pick? Just pick ones that follow any of the rules of the problem and that seem reasonable and easy for you to work with. I’d pick something like this:

x=10, y=25, q=2, w=3, z=1

Now just solve the problem using those numbers. 

Two gumdrops at ten cents apiece is twenty cents. Three candy canes at twenty-five cents apiece is seventy-five cents. Together that makes ninety-five cents. And then if Nat pays with a one-dollar bill, she’ll get five cents back. 

Great! Hold onto that answer! 

You know that with those real numbers you plugged in, that the answer has to be five cents. Now all you have to do is plug those same numbers into the answer choices and see which ones give you five as a result. Dunzo Washington!

Give this approach a shot with this sample problem:

Alison went to the local drugstore to purchase photo prints for her dad for Father’s Day. The prints cost w cents each. Alison buys x prints, and she pays y dollars. How much change, in cents, does Alison get back?

A. wxy

B. y–wx

C. w–xy

D. 100y–wx

E. 100w–xy

Pick your numbers, plug ‘em in, solve, then see what answer choice matches yours.

How’d it go? (‘Cause I’m about to give you the correct answer here. Which is D.)

The one thing to keep in mind is that with this method you have to try ALL the answer choices to make sure more than one doesn’t work. If you find that two answer choices both produce your magic number, you have to simply pick new numbers and test those two answer choices again.

2. USE THE ANSWER CHOICES

One more variation on plugging in: Often you’ll find questions where the answer choices given are all real numbers. In that case, you might be able to solve the question faster by simply plugging in the answer choices and seeing which one works. 

Like on a problem like this:

A gym teacher is sorting athletic equipment into bins and notices that she has twice as many baseballs as footballs, 1 more basketball than baseballs, and one less volleyball than basketballs. She counts exactly 100 balls and has only four types of balls. How many footballs does she have?

A. 9

B. 10

C. 25

D. 26

E. 31

The hard way to do this question is to set up a series of algebraic equations and solve them by using the substitution method. But we don’t need all that fuss. 

The easier way to do this problem is to pick an answer choice, plug it in, and see if it works out the way the problem is saying it should. If it doesn’t, pick another one and try again. On a problem like this, you’ll likely get it by the second try (see Superhack below). 

For instance, if you start by trying the answer choice 25 here for the number of footballs, you’re quickly going to realize you’ve got way more than 100 balls at the end, so you’d want to try something smaller the second time. In this case, the answer turns out to be 9, answer choice A.

Superhack: When using this strategy it’s almost always best to start with the answer choice in the middle. That way, if that first choice ends up not working, you’ll usually know whether you need a smaller or larger number, and can choose from the two smaller options or the two larger ones.

3. GET THE CALCULATOR PROGRAMS

Wanna hear some good news? The ACT lets you use your calculator on the math section. Wanna hear some even better news? There are a slew of highly useful calculator programs that you can download that are COMPLETELY LEGAL to use on this test. 

Why did the global overlords who make this test decide that you should be able to simply plug numbers into your calculator instead of working through the nuts and bolts of complicated problems? I couldn’t tell you (The overlords work in mysterious ways). But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that if you take the time to download these programs and familiarize yourself with them, you will save precious time and energy and confidently get the right answers to those questions.

You’ll need a cord to connect your calculator to your computer. Find one; it will be worth it. (Also: look at my fancy semicolon.)

TWO HACKS FOR ACT READING

MAKE CAVEMAN NOTES

The reading section on the ACT tests for one major skill above others: The ability to read for and understand the MAIN IDEA (of a passage or paragraph). This is a skill which will serve you well not just on this test, but in college and in life (as opposed to, say, finding the inverse function of a line on a graph). 

So what does it mean to “read for the main idea?” Well, it means to zoom out from the details of a passage to the broader point that the author is making. And the way I’d recommend doing that is by MAKING CAVEMAN NOTES. 

Caveman notes are little two-to-five word summaries of each paragraph in a passage. All you have to do is take a moment after reading a paragraph and ask yourself “What was that about?” 

And here’s the thing … don’t start rambling on about it. 

I want you to tell me what it was about in two to five words. Like how a (smart) caveman might describe what the author just told them. Here are a couple examples of what these notes might look like:

PETA angry, make law

Diamonds hard to find

Fire season getting worse

It may seem tricky at first, but if you can boil down a paragraph into a two to five word summary, then you’ll be reading these passages the way they are meant to be read. You can always go back and look at the finer details if a question asks you to, but having a clear sense of the main idea is what’s going to allow you to ace this section.

Give it a shot here. Read this typical intro paragraph to an ACT reading passage and try to summarize it in two to five words.

Legend has it that coffee was first discovered in Ethiopia when a goat herder ate some berries that seemed to make his goats surprisingly energetic. Sometime around 1000 AD, people in Arabia began to use the coffee bean to brew a drink.* One thousand years later, coffee is not just a beverage—it is a worldwide cultural and economic institution. Picture the more than 21,000 Starbucks locations worldwide as evidence. Or consider the fact that coffee is the lead export of 12 different countries. Or simply consider this staggering fact: humans consume four hundred billion cups of coffee annually, making it the second most popular beverage in the world to water.

What did your caveman notes say? 

For me, I’d just say “Coffee is popular.” (Or in even caveman-ier parlance: “Coffee popular”). There are some other details in there, like the goat herder with his hopped up goats, but if you boil it down, this paragraph is just about how popular coffee is. If you’re boiling paragraphs down to those essentials, you’re reading for the main idea and you’ll kill it on this section.

Author’s note: These are some of the best people in history, and we are all very grateful for their work.

DO PAIRED PASSAGES ONE AT A TIME

And here’s one more specific hack for this section. One of the passages on this section will actually be a paired passage. That means that you’ll get two passages that somehow relate to one another and you’ll be asked to answer questions about both of them. 

Here’s the highly useful hack: Read the first passage and answer all the questions about it BEFORE you go on to read the second passage. 

This is going to help for a number of reasons: 

Firstly, it’s less to keep in your head. 

Secondly, grappling with the questions actually helps you to understand the passages, so if you answer a few questions about passage one before you move on to passage two, I guarantee you’ll have a clearer sense of what passage one was about, and you’ll have an easier time seeing how passage two relates to it.

THREE HACKS FOR ACT SCIENCE

LEARN AS LITTLE SCIENCE AS POSSIBLE…

I don’t mean that for actual science. Science is great. But for the ACT Science section …

At first glance the science section can look overwhelming. You’ll be inundated with charts, graphs, text, and terminology—much of it about specific scientific studies that you won’t be familiar with. But you’ll quickly realize that the science test is actually really simple. And the way to master it is by keeping your thinking simple too. 

As it turns out, you actually don’t usually need to even look at half of what they’re talking about. And you certainly don’t need to understand all of it. Your job is to sift through the rainforest of details that they’re giving you and find the actual information you need to answer the question they’re asking. 

That’s why your first strategy is to GO STRAIGHT TO THE QUESTIONS. That’s right, when you get to a new science passage, don’t stop to read it! Go directly to the questions and let them point you to the specific spots they want you to look at. If you are looking in the right place on this section, you will almost always get the right answer.

…BECAUSE THE ACT SCIENCE TEST IS NOT A SCIENCE TEST

Have you ever seen that painting by Rene Magritte where it’s just a picture of a pipe but then the title is This Is Not A Pipe (or Ceci n’est pas une pipe to be accurate). That’s kind of like the science section of the ACT. When you picture the Science section in your mind, picture this title: 

This Is Not a Science Test.

Yes, it’s true that there’s some science that you have to know on this test. On maybe like four questions you will be tested on your knowledge of science. But that means that there are at least thirty-six others which are NOT about science knowledge. 

So what are they about? 

I like to call it Basic Science Reasoning. What happens to one variable when another variable changes? Does it go up? Down? Maybe it goes up then down? What would happen if you tried a new variable that was slightly different from the first one? 

On these questions you’ll be looking at charts and graphs and using your basic science reasoning to find the right answers. Oftentimes, that means looking for the relationship between two things. For instance, what’s the relationship between age and weight in this chart?

Age (days) 1 3 4 6 8 10 13
Weight (mg) 21 18 16 13 11 9 8

If you said that as age goes up, weight goes down, you’d be right. That’s the kind of basic reasoning that this section is all about. One more thing:

INTERPOLATION AND EXTRAPOLATION

Big words, right? Here’s what they mean. Look at these sequences and fill in the missing numbers or letters.

A, B, __, D

2, 4, 6, 8, __

Nice work. You just interpolated and extrapolated, respectively.

Give it a try on an ACT-style question.

The table below shows the Vapor-Liquid Equilibrium of Ethanol-Acetone at various levels of pressure (kPa) at a temperature of 305.15 Kelvin.

Pressure
(kPa)		 Vapor-Liquid Equilibrium
(mol/mol)
11.679 0.000000
14.999 0.04220
16.585 0.06730
19.358 0.11300
22.571 0.17870
24.811 0.23610

1.  At pressure 21 kPa, the Vapor-Liquid Equilibrium of Ethanol Acetone would most likely be:

A. less than 0.06730.

B. between 0.06730 and 0.11300.

C. between 0.11300 and 0.17870.

D. greater than 0.17870.

2. Suppose that the procedure were repeated at higher pressure values. At a value of 30 kPa, the Vapor-Liquid Equilibrium of Ethanol-Acetone would most likely be:

F. less than 0.06730.

G. between 0.06730 and 0.11300.

H. between 0.17870 and 0.23610.

J. greater than 0.23610.

Did you get C and J? Here’s why you should have: 

On the first problem, they asked about the pressure value 21, which is between 19.358 and 22.571 on the chart. Therefore, we can assume that the Vapor-Liquid Equilibrium (whatever that is), is going to be between the two corresponding values on the right. 

One the second problem, we saw that as pressure increased, so did Equilibrium. We can assume that trend will continue as pressure values continue to go up.

That’s interpolation and extrapolation.

Here are some things you don’t have to know to do those problems: What Vapor-Liquid Equilibrium is; what Ethanol Acetone is; whether these pressure values are objectively high or low; what any of the units mean. 

Remember, this is not a science test—this is basically a chart reading test—so keep your thinking simple.

Final Thoughts

There you go! Those are some of the best overall strategies and most useful specific tips, tricks, and hacks for the four sections on the ACT! And that first pass probably only took you … what, 10-15 minutes, right? Review a couple times, get them down, and you’ll be set.

Again, I’m not here to sell you a bill of goods, which is why you’re going to have to practice. But if you practice those strategies and learn those specific hacks, I can promise you that you’ll raise your score, likely by more than three points and probably pretty quickly too. 

And that means that you may well have time to give Season 4 (or 5, or 17, or whatever it is for you now) of Stranger Things a chance after all. (I mean, they are still great characters and the upside down is pretty cool and scary). 

Or not. Whatever. You do you. 

Special thanks to Ryan Harrison for writing this blog post

Ryan is a writer, performer, and teacher from Los Angeles, California. He received his degree in Theater from Northwestern University and has been tutoring since 2009, with a focus on the SAT, ACT, and college essay coaching. His writing has been featured on NBC’s Bring The Funny, TruTV’s Late Night Snack with Rachel Dratch, Live From Here with Chris Thile, and in McSweeny’s. He’s also the co-founder and head writer for the comedy ensemble Lost Moon Radio, which has created and staged upwards of thirty original shows at such venues as The Broad Stage, Dynasty Typewriter, and South Coast Repertory Theater. If you know the whereabouts of this man, please contact your local authorities.