The majority of kids getting ready for the ACT are not sluggish or uninspired. They are simply working on the wrong things. The difference between a 24 and a 30 is usually not ability – it’s three specific, easily correctable practices that unwittingly lose hours of prep time each week.
Mistake #1: skipping full-length practice tests
Students are typically willing to engage in repetitive exercises. For example, they may complete twenty math problems on Tuesday, and then read passages on Thursday. This appears to be a good use of their time but it is not.
The ACT is an exhausting test that takes four hours to complete. If students do not take full-length, timed practice tests they will not become accustomed to the pacing and mental exhaustion they will face during the real test.
Practice with individual sections helps to familiarize students with the content but does not prepare them for the exhaustion that can come during the science test (the fourth section) when their cognitive resources have been depleted by three hours of testing.
The class of 2023’s average composite ACT score fell to 19.5, the lowest it has been in three decades. This is not a sign that today’s students are less intelligent than their predecessors. It is a sign that many students are not practicing in a way that accurately reflects the testing conditions that they will face.
Practicing small segments of the test gives a false sense of mastery. Only full, timed practice tests reveal how the demands of the test affect students when time is ticking, and they are not allowed to go back and check their work.
Fix: schedule at least one full-length, timed practice test every one to two weeks. Sit through all four sections in one sitting, breaks included. Treat it like the real thing, because it’s the only rehearsal that counts.
Mistake #2: reviewing the score instead of the errors
When a student finishes a test, they see a 22 composite and move on. Maybe they feel good. Maybe they feel bad. In both cases, they’ve learned essentially nothing from the experience.
The error log fixes this problem. For every question missed, you mark whether it was because of a content gap (they simply didn’t know how to do it), misreading the question, guessing in a rushed scenario, or running out of time before they could even get to it. Those last 3 errors are very different from the first one.
So long as content gap questions don’t repeat, your student has proven capable of that question; they just made some other mistake. If non-gap questions repeat, you’ve got a problem. But if you don’t even know whether it’s the same mistakes repeating themselves, you can’t make that judgment.
This is right about where most students hit a wall with the test. They can tell something isn’t right, but they can’t diagnose it themselves and just wind up taking “more tests.” Internally, though, they’re making the same mistakes test after test and the number isn’t budging. This is where outside help may be necessary.
If you need a structured way to diagnose and fix recurring errors, ACT tutoring resources can help you build a personalized plan around your most wasteful mistakes. A second set of eyes catches patterns a tired student reviewing their own test at 11pm just won’t see.
Mistake #3: treating every section as equally important
Some sections of the ACT are easier to improve than others. For a specific student, this isn’t necessarily the section they scored lowest in – they might have scored too low to easily fix, or too high to need fixing.
A student isn’t going to be able to pick up a bunch of new math skills, or somehow transform their understanding of algebra in two weeks – erasing an entire section doesn’t happen, even if the student’s exceptional at everything else. Sizable improvements need to come from somewhere else.
A student sitting at a 25 composite who needs a 28 should look at which section has the fastest path to improvement, not spread study time evenly across all four.
Science is the section most often mishandled here. Students assume it’s a memorization test and start reviewing biology and chemistry facts. It isn’t a content test. It’s a reading test disguised as a science test – mostly graph interpretation, table reading, and understanding experimental design.
Students who study facts instead of practicing how to extract information quickly from charts waste hours preparing for a test that isn’t actually being given.
The same logic applies across sections. Reading rewards strategic skimming over careful, cover-to-cover reading. English tests grammar and rhetoric in context, not isolated rule memorization. Math pacing problems usually come from spending too long on early, easier questions and running out of time for the ones worth the same points at the end.
Fix: run a full diagnostic test, then rank sections by score gap and effort required to close it. Put the next few weeks into the section with the best return, not the one that feels most comfortable to study.
Starting early beats studying harder
None of this will be effective if you get started too late. If you only begin your preparation in the fall semester of senior year, you won’t have the option to strategically retake the test, which actually leads to most students improving their scores.
A reasonable preparation timeframe would be to start 8-12 weeks before the actual test date. This allows time for diagnostics, an error log, section prioritization, and a couple of test simulations. Guessing is not penalized on the ACT, and many colleges will consider your superscore, meaning the combination of your best results on each section, regardless of the dates on which these were taken.
Students who are not aware of this fact tend to waste retakes by trying to improve their score on all sections at once, rather than focusing on one or two sections that are reducing their composite score.
In the end, it’s not about working harder, but working smarter. Prioritize the right topics and sections, in the right sequence, and with proper feedback through the process in order to see score improvements.