Some of you will be taking the ACT next month, so we thought we would offer some pre-test tips. 

We find in working with students in the English that many of them lose focus on the question.  For instance, a student may be reading through the passage and run across a question and not really know what the test wants him to do.  When you work the English, try focusing on the answer choices to each question.  With a little practice, you will find that by focusing only on the answers to the questions you can tell what type of question you have in front of you (you will still need to read the passage to figure it out!).  If you see the answer choices all list pronoun options, you know you have a pronoun referent question and should look in the sentence for the matching noun.  If you see the answer choices all list verb forms, you know you have either a subject-verb agreement question or a verb tense question.  If you see the answer choices contain comma variations, you have a comma question.  By focusing on the problem in this way, you will zoom right in on the item tested in the question and what you need to zoom in on in the sentence or passage.  And you will keep yourself from straying into something the question is not asking about!

Give it a try!  We bet it helps!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 8th, 2008 at 11:32 am and is filed under College Entrance Exams, For Parents, For Students, Mentoring, Test Preparation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.