ACT Practice Results and Analysis and My General ACT Journey

    So I took a practice test yesterday. To be honest I felt horrible, I've been sick the past few days so I was not in peak condition. But I say that's a good thing, any mistake I'm prone to I would of made because I didn't have the energy to avoid it; I'll see the full scope of my issues so to speak.

    Anyway when I graded it, my results were pretty much what I expected. Really bad, way worse than my second time taking the ACT. I guess I should go over my journey so far before going into right now.

    I took it once, totally bombed got like a 22 or something, 17 in math blah blah it was not good. I knew I could do better so I took it again without studying except brushing up some algebra stuff, and got a 29 this time. So working with that as my baseline I decided to start taking practice tests. Anyway I don't think I need to even bother studying the reading section because I got a 36 on it, but the other sections (looking at you math) could do with improvement. I got a 23 on the math, 27 English, and 29 science.

    Okay, anyway, back to the practice test. 22 math, 26 English, and 22 science. I couldn't finish the math and science sections, with 9 ish questions left on each. Oh I guess I should cover my methodology. I sat down with a practice test online, grabbed a piece of paper and some extra scratch paper, then set a timer and took each test how I will on test day. Nothing crazy.

    Anyway, my strategy for English is mostly vibes. Whatever sounds right, mark that down. So who could of guessed most of my errors were just messing up English things because "vibes" without much technical knowledge probably isn't the best strategy. I could not tell you what an adverb is if you put a gun to my head and everyone I loved to be honest. Mixed in there were questions I only missed because I was really really tired (did I mention I had only gotten 6 hours of sleep?) and sick. My main lesson learned? Conciseness above all. Most of the questions I got wrong were just because the vibes didn't lead me to the shortest way to communicate the information in the passage.

    Next to math. Geometry. 10/19 questions I got wrong (not counting the last 8 I didn't answer) were all geometry. I only made two errors with algebra, one question I got the right answer and marked it down wrong on my sheet, the other I forgot about the denominator for a fraction (yeah oops). The remaining 7 were mixed statistics and trigonometry. I did not "get" geometry well at all. It's been my lowest grade in high school (so far) at a 82 or something (mostly because I never turned in my homework on time, which is my bad). Who would of thought that not paying attention in geometry would screw me over later. In my school the "geometry" class also has units on statistics and trig, so I did get screwed over by me from the past. Damn you me from the past.

    For science, I didn't feel like going over it. I feel like you can't really "study" the science section like the others, because it doesn't rely on your prior knowledge and focuses more on data analysis. I mean sometimes knowing some basic chemistry will help out but you'll never get something wrong because you forgot how to perform stoichiometry (damn you red swigily line). Or maybe I'm just making excuses because I'm tired. Whatever.

    I applaud whoever bothered to read this far through my unpolished thoughts. What's next? I guess... Khan Academy to learn that geometry and answer the questions I got wrong/didn't answer. Then take another one next week. My ACT is in July by the way, I'll probably update you then about it.