Book Preface

Three Tips for ACT Success

Colleges will consider your ACT score as part of your application, so it’s no surprise that it’s a pretty tough test. It can feel intimidating, like a barrier you need to climb over. At Kaplan, it’s our goal to help you look at the ACT as an opportunity—a chance to demonstrate your knowledge, as well as your critical thinking skills, which will be key to your success as a college student. Looking at the ACT as an opportunity will help you do better on the test.

Besides committing to a positive attitude toward the test, give yourself a head start with these tips:

• The ACT is a standardized test, meaning that scores for every testing administration mean the same thing. To achieve this reliability, the test maker must always ask questions on the same topics and in the same way. This makes the test predictable and, therefore, easier to prepare for. We’ve distilled how high-scoring students approach each section into Kaplan Methods. In fact, each method gets its own chapter. Learn these simple, step-by-step methods, and you’ll approach questions like an expert.
• The ACT is not like the tests you take in school. When colleges want to know how you do on tests in school, they look at your transcript. Acing the ACT requires different skills. This book highlights these skills, from taking math shortcuts to avoiding wrong-answer “traps” to managing your time. By studying this book, you’ll learn to think like the test.
• Your skill level now has nothing to do with your skill level on test day. Getting some questions wrong? Having trouble with a specific topic? That just means you’ve found an opportunity to raise your score. Be patient with yourself! In your life so far, you’ve already learned thousands of things. You can learn a few more things to succeed on the ACT.

Read on to learn how your book and online resources are organized and how to make the best use of them. Good luck on the test—you’re going to nail it!

Chapter Organization

The chapters in this book follow a standard format to make this book as easy to use as possible.

How Much Do You Know?

At the beginning of most chapters, you have an opportunity to assess how much you already know about the topics by answering a set of test-like questions. If you answer most or all of the questions in a set correctly and in the most efficient way, you may want to skip one or more lessons in that chapter. If you answer some or all of the questions in a set incorrectly or in an inefficient way, you will want to review most or all of the lessons in that chapter. The answers and explanations for these sections are provided in the “Check Your Work” section immediately after the question set.

Try on Your Own

The lessons within each chapter start with a question (or passage) typical of the way the ACT tests a given topic and ends with a set of practice questions called “Try on Your Own.” These sections are designed to provide immediate, targeted practice. Complete these questions and review their explanations at least once after reviewing the lesson. You might consider completing these questions multiple times if you are preparing for the ACT over an extended period of time. The answers and explanations for these sections are provided at the end of each chapter.

How Much Have You Learned?

You need to reinforce what you learn in each chapter by practicing the Kaplan methods and strategies. Most chapters include a section called “How Much Have You Learned?” that features additional practice questions reinforcing the concepts explained in that chapter. The answers and explanations for these sections are provided at the end of each chapter.

On Test Day

Most of the Math chapters include an “On Test Day” section that highlights one or more ways a question can be approached strategically. Complete these sections after you have reviewed the lessons but before you complete the “How Much Have You Learned?” question set.

Reflect

These sections can be completed during or after a chapter’s completion. You might prefer to use the Reflect sections to evaluate your retention over time or reflect on the chapter as a whole when you complete all of the lessons. However you choose to reflect on your ACT studying, what’s important is taking the time to do so.

The SmartPoints^® System

Different topics are worth different numbers of points on the ACT because they show up more or less frequently in questions. By studying the information released by the test maker, Kaplan has been able to determine how often certain topics are likely to appear on the ACT, and therefore, predict how many points these topics are worth on test day. This means that if you master a given topic and answer all of the questions from that category correctly on test day, then you can expect to earn approximately that number of SmartPoints out of the overall 36 points total for that test.

The breakdown of SmartPoints for English, Math, Reading, and Science are summarized in the following tables. You can also see how these topics align to chapters in this book.