Composed of 75 questions at a 45-minute hard stop, the English section is, first and foremost, about grammar and punctuation. More specifically, it’s about the specific forms of grammar and punctuation that the ACT deems important. This means you won’t be expected to know the difference between a period and a semicolon but will be expected to know four specific situations in which you can use a comma. It also means 30% of the English section of the ACT will be based on test-specific rules, or magic tricks, which you can automatically answer based on the internal structure of the exam.

Ultimately, if you learn the strategy files we’ve made and how to apply them, there’s nothing that should stop you from acing ACT English.

Math is the one section of the ACT that’s actually based on skills you’ve learned in school. With 60 increasingly difficult questions to complete in 60 minutes, your job is to work through problems from numbers & quantity, algebra, geometry, and advanced skills from Algebra II.

Since every math question has two kinds of answers (a right answer and a trap), your goal for Math is to either get the question correct or get it wrong in a way unanticipated by the test makers. The advanced skill questions cover themes ranging from matrices and imaginary numbers to logarithms and conics, but even if you haven’t covered some of these subjects in school, the ACT only expects about a C- level of understanding of advanced skills. Often the hardest questions require relatively little math but involve challenging conceptual moves that aren’t ordinarily taught in standard school math curricula.

The myth about the Reading section of the ACT is that it’s a test of a student’s ability to comprehend and analyze written passages. This isn’t quite untrue inasmuch as reading comprehension skills will benefit you on the ACT, but the more fundamental skill for Reading is learning how to read quickly under enormous time pressure. A 70-minute test the ACT requires you to do in 35 minutes, Reading is a pride-swallowing siege of scanning, parsing, and locating words, synonyms, and ideas in passages in rapid-fire time and then triaging answer choices for traps and correct answers.

Our experts have deciphered algorithms for logical rules and correct answer locations and methods for reading quickly that will benefit you in both speed and accuracy on the ACT. And these skills will help you in college too; when your professor asks you to read 300 pages a week, you’ll know how to distill large amounts of information very effectively and quickly thanks to our work together.

The Science section, technically the Science Reasoning section, is ostensibly based on the biology, chemistry, and physics you learned in school, but there’s very little actual science on this test. With only 2-4 questions on science concepts you learned in high school, ACT science tests you on hard-to-pin-down skills like data analysis, chart reading, and the use of the principle of sufficient reason. Which is not to downplay its interdisciplinary rigor by any means, but we’ve discovered content-related rules, procedures, and methods to support even the most apprehensive students to jump 8, 9, and sometimes more than 10 points.

The ACT Writing section is not only optional but entirely unnecessary because colleges do not use it as a criterion in the admissions process.  Legend has it that colleges once scrutinized the Writing score–alongside students’ personal statements to spot inconsistencies–but they soon found out that writing scores were more highly correlated with the length of students’ essays than with their quality.   Generally, we advise students not to take the Writing (a “Pascal’s Wager” kind of thing), but we have resources to help students with the section should they so desire.