117: How to Improve Your ACT Score By 2 Points in 20 Minutes

Ethan Sawyer  0:13  
Hey, friends. Ethan Sawyer, college sa guy here, my goal is to bring more ease, joy and purpose into the college application process. Welcome to the College sa guy podcast, where it's my job to interview some of the most awesome and rad minds in the college admissions world. I'm not sure what the difference is there, but there's probably a difference. Analyze their genius, break it down for you in a series of practical, actionable steps that you can take, whether applying to college yourself or helping someone else apply. Now, normally, what I have to do is take stuff and break it down into practical, actionable steps. But on this episode, which is part two of two, tutor, Ted, has already done it for you. So what he's basically done, I went on his podcast and I did how to improve your personal statement in 20 minutes. So I asked him, Hey, would you be down to do it, how to improve your a CT score by two points in 20 minutes? And he was like, for sure. And I was like, Ted, I trust you so much with this, I'm just gonna let you do it. So I had him just actually record a 20 minute podcast and send it over to me. And it's got everything from like, you know how to take advantage of programs on your calculator. Why studying math vocabulary is super important. There's a really good tip on that, why you need to be selective in your focus on the science section and why you should write a lot for the writing test. So all this and more. Enjoy tutor Ted drop in the knowledge for the A, C, T.


Amie Dorsey  1:34  
So Ethan had this great idea for us to do this podcast where we shared practical strategies. And I love that idea. And what I'm going to do is basically tell students how they can improve their A, C, T scores by two points in 20 minutes. So I'm already 15 seconds in, so I better get to it and and get cranking. So the one other sort of lead up element I'm going to include is the fact that there are short term improvements you can make, and long term improvements you can make, and we actually love both of them. The short term improvements are about knowing the test better, knowing the tools you can use to take advantage of the structure of the test or the nature of the test. The long term strategies are things like improving yourself as a reader, which is obviously a really valuable skill to have, but not something that I mean other than me telling you, hey, get to be a better reader, is not really sort of a 20 minute prep strategy that said, get to be a better reader, but we're going to jump in on the short term stuff, the stuff that you can employ right away. So we're going to go through the test in sequence, in sequence of the sections of the test, and not just for convenience, but also because the English and the math test, but really the English in particular, that's the section where you can make the most improvement in a hurry. So let's talk about the English. Let's talk about what you can do there to make immediate improvement to your score. I've got three things, three strategies I'm going to propose. These are all by the way, in our free A, C, T course, which is actually quite related to this course. We have a free course online at Learn dot tutor, ted.com that gives a, what we call the five minute version of each of the sections. So these are kind of ripped from that, but if you want to go to learn dot tutor, ted.com, to check these out. Okay, for English, three things you want to keep in mind. Number one, shorter is better. Conciseness is valued in writing in general. It is highly valued by the A, C, T, and if you blindly went through the test, I don't recommend you go blindly through the test, but if you did, and you picked all the shortest answers, you'd perform surprisingly well. So I would, I would really bias yourself in favor of answer choices that are shorter. If there are two, sorry, if there are three answer choices that are, say, 10 or 15 words long, and one answer choice that is one word long, there was like a 98% chance that it's the one word answer. So bias yourself in favor of shorter answer choices. And if you can get rid of a sentence or a phrase entirely, you should do it. So that's a way. It's a really simple way of being concise. Another tendency of the A, C, T is they seem to hate commas, or they think that that the high school students use way too many commas, so bias yourself against commas, and unless you know you need a comma, then get rid of as many as you possibly can. There are places where commas are used. Obviously we actually have a real use for them. But on the A, C, T, they seem to have a mission to discourage you from using commas. So I would take that to heart. The third one applies to the editorial questions. And this might actually be my favorite one, because it's, it's it's sort of like one of those hacks that, once you know it, it's sort of surprisingly it's sort of surprisingly obvious. Yes, but it also is just incredibly powerful. It's surprising how powerful it is to me. And that is basically, read the question really, really carefully, so that you know what it is they're asking you to deliver. That's the thing you want to you want to know. You want to underline that within the question, basically they'll say something like, suppose the writer wanted to add a sentence that fill in the blank, whatever's in that blank, that's what you want to obsess with, and you literally want to underline it within the question and say, oh, okay, this is what they want for me. Okay, great. Let me give it to them. When you do that, when you focus that carefully, and say, Okay, these are the things. These are all the qualities they want me to bring in. It's going to make finding those answer choices really, really clear to you, because when you see the right answer, it'll sort of jump off the page at you, because it'll hit on all the counts of the thing that they're asking for. Okay, so let's check the time here. All right, we're four minutes in doing great for the math test. Some of the things that you can do. So the trick with math is a CT. Math covers everything from fourth grade math up through 11th grade, even some 12th grade stuff. They include some statistics stuff that if you're going for the 36 in the math, you're going to want to have a quick review of terms from statistics for most students. That's not going to be the most important thing. It's not going to be on every single test. It does show up here and there, and it's worth knowing if you're going for the perfect score. But the point I wanted to make is that it's really difficult for me in 20 minutes to teach you a bunch of content. So let me teach you the more general stuff. And this is stuff that applies to every student, whatever level they are working at. So the first thing I would say is use your calculator. Your calculator is a very powerful tool. They let you walk into the room with, you know, a very sophisticated graphing calculator, and you want to make use of it. They also allow you to use programs. And your programs can have up to 25 lines of code, which is actually pretty robust you can you can write some pretty good programs in under 25 lines of code. So some of the examples I have are. One of the programs is a slope and distance program, where, if you input two points, it will calculate the slope between the points, the distance between them, and the y intercept of the line that goes through those two points. So it does a lot of work, a lot of simple work, right? You probably know how to do all of those things, but it does it quickly. It does it with 100% accuracy. And we like accuracy a lot when it comes to the A, C, T, okay. So another thing that I would highly recommend is studying math by the vocabulary. Basically, one thing I've noticed about the A, C, T math is it doesn't ask you to do a lot of complex computation. It just requires you to know a lot of stuff, to have been exposed to a lot of terminology, and so if you know the terms, you're going to be in good shape. So I would do a practice test, and I would underline or circle every single term that is less than 100% sort of ice cold for you. And look those up and make a list of those things, and stack your math vocabulary as high as you possibly can, because knowing that stuff is it's just gold. Because when you get when you come across a question with the term and you know the term, the question is easy. When you come across a question with a term and you don't know the term, it's impossible. So it's just a real breaking point for a lot of students. And it's not that hard to learn that stuff or to refresh that stuff, because you probably did learn it at some point. So just tuck away that math vocabulary, and I would also tuck away the idea that this is not a computation test. This is not about drilling you and making you do really, you know, difficult or lengthy problems. They're not they're not that lengthy at all. They're lengthy in how they're written. But the work tends to be pretty simple and just about, do you know this thing or not?


One other math strategy is, towards the end of the test, they'll always give you a really complicated formula, a fairly complicated formula. And this goes along with what I was just saying about the computation thing. An example would be, say, the formula for the lateral area of a cone, which I believe is one half circumference times the slant height, pretty sure about that. Or say, the law of cosines, which you may have studied this year in school, or law of sines. And the funny thing is, they always give you the formula or a description of the formula. And the important thing is, the formula itself, having having been given the formula, they tend to the questions tend to sound very technical and difficult because they're describing a formula. But the cool thing is, all you're doing on those questions is dropping numbers into that formula. So you're going to see these questions. It doesn't matter what the formula is. I promise you, you're going to see a complex formula question where they give you the formula. And just remind yourself the only strategy on these things is, please drop numbers into the variables. Spots. And oftentimes you don't even have to solve the equation. They'll actually just have you put those numbers in the right place and then just report that that's it. Just give, you know, give the give them the formula with the numbers in there. Last thing I would say is, please know SOH CAH TOA, there will be three or four questions that involve Soca toa sine is equal to opposite over hypotenuse et cetera. Make sure you know that stuff, ice cold, you know without any hesitation, because those are free and easy points when you know that stuff. So that's that's a winner for me. All right. So if you've taken a practice reading test, you'll know that the biggest challenge is the speed of the test. So how do you work faster? How do you do this test, right? Well, the interesting thing is that you actually want to do this test differently than you do tests in school. When you do tests in school, so long as you went to a school like the school I went to and all my students go to you, you answer a question by reading all the answer choices, thinking about which one makes the most sense, sort of potentially second guessing your answer choice, reading all the answer choices again, and working through and just like thinking twice or three times until you get an answer that you're happy with, you cannot do that on the A, C, T, Reading. It's just not it's not plausible. It's not feasible. So what you have to do instead is basically haul ass through it. When you read an answer choice, when you read the question and you read an answer choice, and it sounds like a good like a winner, for you pick it and move on. Because that's all the time you have to do. That's all the time that is given to you on the reading test, you basically want to sacrifice some amount of kind of quality control for speed. Some students are really quick, and could actually get through this entire test working at their sort of full, you know, intellectual capacity in those 35 minutes. Most can't. For me, if I want to, if I'm doing one of these tests, I would say I'm maybe above average in speed, but I'm not crazy fast, and it's it can be a time crunch for me to to get through the reading section, too. So I do this same thing. If I read the question, I know what the question is about, and I find the answer choice. And you know, if I if I read a and a is the right answer that I was thinking of, I will pick a and not read B, C or D. If I had all the time in the world, I'd come back and I'd read B, C or D, and I'd think, you know, like, crazy about it, but you really want to keep your thinking simple, pick answers and then move the heck on. Now, related to this is thinking about how you can work fast. Like, how do we work fast? And one thing is just making quicker decisions that that's the that's what I'm recommending to you, primarily, another thing is being energized, right? So like being actually alert, awake, well fed, well rested, and all that stuff that'll make you as quick as you possibly can be. While we're at it, why don't we segue over to the science? So science is like the reading in the timing of it. So a lot of information is presented. You'll get six passages, six passages or seven passages. It's usually six these days, over 35 minutes, and you have to answer 40 questions, which is, it's quite a bit. So the question is, how would you get through all of that material? The answer is, you can't get through all of that material. You don't want to get through all that material. You actually want to be selective in what you are processing and looking at and using to answer the question. So when I get to that test, I will open to the science and go straight to the question, immediately go to the questions. The only exception, by the way, is when you have the conflicting viewpoints passage, which is the passage with multiple different say, scientists or teachers or students who are proposing conflicting theories. On that one, you actually want to read them ahead of time, because you want to understand what they say, how they differ, how they agree, etc. Other than that, you want to read the questions, answer the questions linearly, directly from the passage, and just find what you need to find and ignore the rest. And that seems like really kind of strange advice. It seems like, well, you know, why wouldn't you want to process everything? And the answer to that question, why wouldn't you want to process everything, is, you don't have the time, you just don't have the ability to get through all of that information. They know that they designed the test that way. And so you want to sort of process the minimum amount possible in order to answer the question successfully. The related sort of thing I want to throw in about the science is, a lot of people think, you know, well, I don't know that much science. I haven't I haven't taken AP science. You really don't need very much science knowledge. On any given test, there are between zero, sometimes there are none, and four questions that require science knowledge. A lot of that science knowledge is what I call science common sense, where it's the sort of essential, most logical understanding of how an experiment might work. So one example I. Think of offhand was the experiment had involved dissolving a cube of a solid in some solution. So you took some cube, you put it in there, and the question said, if I broke that cube up into eight smaller cubes and put that into the solution, then what would be the result, and how would the timing of this be affected? Would it dissolve faster in the solution or slower in the solution? And what I think is the common sense answer, which is the right answer, was, it'll dissolve faster. Basically, there's more surface area, it'll get exposed to the solution faster, and it'll dissolve faster. It's sort of like the idea of, I don't know how many of you are tea drinkers out there. I happen to be one, but


the if you put a sugar cube in your tea versus just loose sugar, then it'll dissolve faster when it's the loose sugar. And if you had powdered sugar, which is even smaller and broken up even more than regular sugar, that would dissolve even faster. So basically, the more pieces it's broken into, the more surface area that's exposed, the faster it'll dissolve. And that's literally the kind of science knowledge you'd ever have to have on a test. I did see one question one time about the function of one part of the cell. To me that probably it was the ribosomes, by the way, that that would be as technical as it would ever get. But usually it's much simpler than that. It's about science, common sense. The things I would recommend you definitely know would be density. Density is equal to mass divided by volume. Make sure you know that density is mass divided by volume. The other thing is pH level, where, as pH of seven is neutral, below that is acidic, above that is basic. You know that you're in really good shape. Okay, so on the writing test, the first piece of advice about the writing test is do it. So when you sign up for the test, it'll say the writing test is optional. Do you want to do it? It'll cost you 20 bucks or something like that. You definitely want to do it, unless you are in the very, very rare situation where you already have your college list completely written, and you know that every single school on that list does not require the ACT essay. The thing is, you might, you know, if it's the spring of your junior year, we don't even know what schools will require, necessarily. So they'll, they kind of change their policies from year to year. I would write the essay you're already there. And the painful, you know, sad truth of it is, you can't write the essay unless you're there for the rest of the test. So while you're there, you might as well do it. Is it going to be fun? No, are you going to wish that you were anywhere else on planet Earth other than writing that essay? Definitely. But you're there, you might as well knock it out. The secret you know, the most important thing you can do, the easy one, is to write a lot. You want to have cover as much ground as you possibly can. The task is pretty dense. They give you a perspective, a prompt about an issue, usually a contemporary issue, like, you know, screens, you know, screen free time, or something like that, or intelligent machines that was, that was the first sample prop they released, and then they'll tell you about it. So intelligent machines like the cash out, the cashier registers, where you can check yourself out of the store. And then underneath that, after they kind of describe that that idea, they'll have three different perspectives on it, three different opinions. The old instructions and the instructions that are still in the A, C, T book as of the 2017, 18 book tell you to analyze all three of the given perspectives. The recent tests have actually said you don't have to analyze all three. So read the Read the directions of the essay very carefully. Just look at the bullet points, sort of about three fourths the way down the page where it says, essay task, and just make sure you're doing what they're asking you to do. My My hunch is that it's going to be the the more recent version of it, where you don't have to analyze all three perspectives. Now you can analyze all three perspectives, and that'd be awesome if you can. And that that's sort of where, that's where this, you know, write as much as you can. Idea comes in handy. So the most important thing to do, though, and the thing that we know you'll have to do is to present your own perspective. They tell you that your own perspective can be in can be totally unique. It can be in partial agreement with one of their perspectives, or complete agreement with one of their perspectives. I would say, if you're going for the highest grade possible, I would generally try to avoid being in complete agreement with one of their perspectives, because that sort of limits your ability to showcase your analytical capacity, because all you'd mostly be doing is sort of harping on why that one was right. You'd have to do a really good job of contextualizing it and providing some concrete examples to verify that in an interesting way, in a way that's going to get you a really good score. So my inclination would be to come up with my own perspective. The best advice I can give for doing that would be to read the perspectives really carefully when you first start, and take some time. You get 40 minutes to write the essay, and you might be surprised by how value. Goal the planning time is, I think it's really easy to get a little bit panicky and think, you know, I should start writing now. You know, this is the clock is ticking, and I better get going. I think that can be a mistake. I think that often when you start writing too soon, you end up sort of petering out with still 10 or 15 minutes left on the clock. I think it's a better idea to take a full five minutes, six minutes, seven minutes, maybe even eight minutes of planning time. Really think about what you want to say, outline it. Come up with your own perspective. Be excited about it, because once you do that, you're going to write a ton. Yes, if you plan for eight minutes, you only have 32 minutes left to write. But if you know exactly what you want to say. You're gonna have a ton to say. So that's, that's my best advice for the writing test. So there's 20 minutes of a CT advice. This. All the things I just mentioned are things that will improve your score. So, you know, think in those ways work, in those ways, on the on the reading and the science work according to the way that the test is built, right? Don't try to apply a classroom mentality to this particular test, because it's a weird test. It's a unique test. So we got to kind of do it their way. On the English test, look for the things that they are sort of biased towards, and on the math test, be as calculator heavy as you can and don't be intimidated by those big formula questions. That's it. Let it rip. When I started this, I was thinking I would improve the improve your a CT score by two points in 20 minutes. And I think we may have done more than that. We'll see. But employ these strategies and then just let us know how it goes, because I think it might be more like three we just got there.


Ethan Sawyer  21:41  
That's it. Thanks for listening. You can check out all the show notes on the show notes page, college essay guide.com/blog and check out tutor Ted's website, learn dot tutor ted.com he's got some really amazing resources. And best of luck. Talk soon. You


Transcribed by https://otter.ai