ACT Practice Test and Answer Keys. Stop Guessing. Start Spotting. A blog about identifying act practice taking the test.

The ACT, a standardized test used for undergraduate admissions at American colleges and universities, includes four tests: English, math, reading, and science reasoning. These tests are designed to measure skills that are most important for success in postsecondary education and that are acquired in secondary education. Each test produces a score on a scale of 1-36; the scores for each test are averaged for the composite score.

I learned about the two-pronged nature of spotting and guessing from my father, who’s an act practice test. He taught me to look for clear indicators of what is correct and what is incorrect before attempting to answer a previously unseen question.

The best thing you can do is learn to spot wrong answers. As in: “That answer can’t be right because…” or “This answer might be right because…”

So if you’re in doubt about the correct answer, try eliminating wrong answers first and then guessing from one of the remaining options.

For example, let’s say you’re given this question:

A mad scientist has invented a time machine. He goes back in time one year and steals $1 million from himself. After returning to the present, he has more money than he had when he left, because he has both the $1 million he stole and the same amount that was already his. What happened?

You probably don’t know the answer immediately. But you know it’s impossible for someone to have more money after giving away $1 million than they had before; therefore, A can’t be right. If you don’t know which option is correct, at least you’ve narrowed your selection down to three choices rather than four.

You can’t study or prepare for the ACT and SAT.

Wait, what?

Here’s the thing: you can study and prepare. You can even increase score. But you can’t do it by studying or preparing in the way we normally think of those things. The right approach is to learn how to spot the ACT or SAT when you see it, and then act accordingly.

I’ve been teaching for a long time, and have seen a lot of ACT prep go wrong. It almost always goes wrong when students get tricked into thinking that test prep is like any other kind of studying or preparation. That’s because the SAT and ACT aren’t like anything else; they aren’t designed by geniuses, but they are designed to be taken by geniuses (or at least people who are highly skilled at taking tests). The result is that test prep is nothing like schoolwork, research projects, or even other exams—and yet most people try to do it like those things anyway. They use strategies that work well with normal kinds of problems on these strange new problems, and end up getting nowhere fast.

What if you could see things differently? What if you had a totally different approach?

I’ve been a tutor for over 10 years, and I’ve spent much of that time teaching ACT test prep. It’s a great standardized test to teach, especially in the age of the new SAT. Many students are finding that their ACT scores are much better than their SAT scores, and that they can compete well at their top choice colleges with those scores.

In this blog post, I will share five tips for getting the most out of your ACT practice tests. If you follow these tips, you’ll be able to “spot” mistakes more efficiently and effectively on test day.

If you’re taking the ACT, you’ve no doubt heard the phrase “eliminate the wrong answers.” It’s ACT shorthand for “spot and assess.”

To spot and assess is to look at an answer choice and decide what you think about it. You are not trying to prove it wrong or right; you are simply reacting to it.

The reason spotting and assessing is so important is that most incorrect answer choices will have something wrong with them. In fact, some of the best ways to spot and assess are to look for errors in punctuation, grammar, spelling, tense, subject-verb agreement, etc. But don’t stop there. If a choice doesn’t sound right to you or if it seems out of place or too extreme in relation to the question being asked and/or the passage being read, then mark that choice for further scrutiny.

When assessing an answer choice, don’t be afraid to draw conclusions about whether you like or dislike an answer choice. These conclusions need not be cast in stone; rather they should be the first step in a process of elimination.

The ACT is a test that drives many students crazy. The problem of course is that standardized tests have been around for ages, but the ACT is a relatively new player on the block. The SAT has been around since 1926, and it’s highly likely that your parents or even grandparents have taken some version of this test. Because the ACT hasn’t been around as long as other tests, students are more frequently unsure of how to approach it.

In an effort to help you take better control of your test taking strategy, we’ve put together some helpful tips that will help you maximize your score on the ACT. These are some things you may not have heard from your teacher or counselor, but we guarantee they will help you improve your score in a big way!

In the ACT English section, there are questions that ask you to choose between two sentences. One of those sentences is correct, and the other has a problem. (There are also questions that ask you to identify the problem in a sentence, but I’ll cover those in another post.)

If you’re looking at two sentences and you have no idea which one is incorrect or why, then you can’t solve this type of question. You need to be able to spot problems in order to answer these questions correctly.

One option for figuring out how to spot problems is to memorize all the rules for grammar and punctuation. Unfortunately, there are tons of rules on the ACT English (more than 100), and it would be tough to memorize them all anyway. It takes most people years of school learning English before they know all the rules well enough to get every question right on this test.

By using our process instead, you can learn how to spot most problems without memorizing all the rules.