SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips

Do you receive your education at home or outside the formal setting of a public or private school? If you're a homeschooled student aiming to go to a 4-year college, then you're probably planning to take the ACT (or its equivalent, the SAT).

This guide will go over how you can prep for the ACT as a homeschooled student, come up with a solid test plan, and be strategic in your approach to taking this important test. The first step is asking yourself about your strengths and weaknesses as a student.

Assess Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Is your imagination carried away when you read fiction, but scientific charts and graphs make you feel stuck? Do you love the challenge of word problems, but feel scared of the big blank page when it comes time to write an essay? Maybe you find something interesting in all your subjects, but you struggle to answer questions under strict time limits.

Taking the time to honestly assess your strengths and weaknesses as a student will help you prep for the ACT. Rather than studying every section and question type equally, you should focus your energies on those areas where you need the most improvement. If time management is tough for you, for example, then you should learn and try time-saving strategies, along with timing yourself while you take practice tests.

Through targeting and drilling your weaknesses, you can enhance your skills, gain confidence, and improve your overall scores. As a homeschooled student, you might be especially aware of your strengths, interests, and challenges as a student.

Self-Reflection and ACT Prep

Many home educators follow a philosophy of "natural learning" or "autonomous learning" that gives students more independence and input into shaping their learning by following their passions. If this sounds like your experience, then you likely have more practice with cultivating self-awareness than your peers who went through a traditional school system. As mentioned above, students who really improve their ACT scores don't just get to know the test really well, they also get to know themselves really well.

Rather than wasting time repeating what you already know, you can strategically approach test prep with a plan to identify and drill your weak spots. Any areas of difficulty can be improved with training, just like you get better at layups by practicing them or at playing piano by repeating scales and songs.

Distributing your effort where it can make the most difference will make your test prep most effective. Plus you might present an even stronger case to your teacher(s) for adding some ACT prep to your daily classes or homework assignments.

Give Input Into Your Curriculum

Do you get any say in what you're learning? If your educators are open to your contributing to the curriculum—which is often the case within home education—perhaps you can incorporate ACT prep into your day. Share your goal of getting into a 4-year college, and articulate how important scoring well on the ACT is to meeting that goal.

If you can integrate ACT science, math, English, Reading, and essay questions into your classroom learning, then you can ground your learning in the context of the test and apply your understanding to practice problems. It will be a two-way street where your classroom learning can complement your ACT prep, and vice versa.

If you're studying geometry, for instance, find some official ACT practice questions and include them as practice or a test. To practice stating and supporting your point of view in a 5-paragraph essay, bring in ACT essay questions (bonus points if you can time them for 30 minutes).

Lee Binz of HomeScholar says it's "helpful to have your teen choose curriculum—especially in their weak areas. As your teens progress, try to engage them in curriculum choosing." This applies to ACT prep as much as any of your learning. Hopefully you can share your post-secondary goals, integrate ACT prep into class and homework, and incorporate more time limits to get used to the strict timing of the ACT. Of course, in order to effectively design a study plan on your own and as part of your curriculum, you must gain a clear understanding of exactly what's on the ACT.

Can you give some input into your curriculum?

Understand the Content of the ACT

What's the difference between the Reading and English section of the ACT? How many math classes should you take to do well on the math section? Is the Science section about straight recall or interpretation of experiment results? How many questions are in each section, anyway?

The first step when preparing for the ACT should be thoroughly understanding what's on the Reading, English, Math, and Science sections (and don't forget about the essay, if you're taking the ACT Plus Writing!). With all the information on the test out there, you shouldn't have any surprises on test day. After reviewing the content of the test, you should try taking a diagnostic practice test.

Official ACT practice tests are best, and you can simulate testing conditions by sitting in a quiet place and timing each section. Then you can score your test and figure out which areas were easy and which were challenging. Analyzing your mistakes, along with reflecting on your general strengths and weaknesses as I talked about above, will give you a good launching point. Once you know where you're starting and where you'd like to arrive, you can design a study plan that will take you there.

Design a Study Plan

It's helpful to know where you're starting out from and the target scores you want to achieve. Apart from integrating test prep into your classes, you'll benefit from putting in the time and effort to study on your own. The following is an estimate of how many hours of prep you should devote in order to improve your composite score. These are rough estimates that could vary depending on your individual learning style and rate of growth.

ACT Composite Point Improvement

0-1 points—10 hours
1-2 points—20 hours
2-4 points—40 hours
4-6 points—80 hours
6-9 points—150 hours+

Before freaking out about the 150 hours+, think about how much time you could accumulate if you start studying early. If you took the ACT in the fall of junior year, the spring of junior year, and again in the fall of senior year, you'd have a whole year to improve from your first test (plus all the studying you did the summer before junior year).

Let's think about this year between your first and final ACT test. There are about 48 weeks in 12 months, so studying for just 2 to 3 hours a week already adds up to 96 to 144 hours. If you could set aside just a few hours each week, then you could put in lots of prep time and see a significant score improvement. Plus you probably want to ramp up your study time in the couple of months before your test date.

Besides reinforcing the concepts you need to know for the ACT, you also want to learn about and try out strategies to learn which ones work best for you.

Get Strategic

While you can't know exactly what questions you'll get on test day, you can have a pretty clear idea. Since the ACT is a standardized test given nationwide (and internationally, too), the testmakers must use a similar template for their questions test after test. By really examining the types of math, reading, English, and science questions, you can have a sense of what the questions are getting at and how they are generally reformulations of the same types of questions.

Besides looking strategically at the questions, you can use strategies to save time. By glancing over the passage-based questions and skimming the passages for the main points, for instance, you'll save a lot more time than if you did a close read the first time. By using process of elimination on the questions, you can see what "tricks" the ACT is using to distract you from the correct answer.

Read about strategies, learn to recognize the common "distractor" answer choices, and utilize the approach that helps you avoid the common pitfalls and save time. Part of this, as I talked about above, is timing yourself as you prep to learn how to work quickly and efficiently.

Ready...set...go!

Use a Stopwatch

Have an iPhone or Android? Use the stopwatch feature to time yourself as you take practice tests. Or kick it old school and use an actual stopwatch, like the shiny one above. Here is how much time you get for each section:

English: 45 minutes
Math: 60 minutes
Reading: 35 minutes
Science: 35 minutes
Essay: +30 minutes

Taking your time to deeply understand the concepts is fine, but once you are taking practice tests, you should really set the same conditions that you'll experience on test day. If you can't demonstrate your knowledge in a short amount of time, then you unfortunately won't be able to hit the ACT scores you deserve.

Studying concepts, applying strategies, and taking practice tests takes sustained focus and effort, and I'm definitely not trying to suggest that studying for the ACT is your only focus in high school. You have other classes, activities, plus the other parts of the college process to think about. But if you really want to perform well on the ACT, then you should make time to improve your scores through studying. So how can you balance ACT prep with everything else? (Hint: the answer is not to cut out sleeping at night.)

Strike a Balance with Test Prep and Everything Else

That last tip about starting early is really helpful for finding balance and making time for test prep in your busy schedule. Write down a schedule for yourself, and try to make a routine of it (things might come up, but try to keep this routine as regular as possible). If you start early, then you won't be struck with the anxiety of an approaching test date and no time (anxiety gets in the way of focusing and retaining information, too—no fun for anybody).

Perhaps you're motivated by the last minute study rush, which is fine. Everyone has different study styles. But without learning about the ACT and taking the diagnostic test, you won't know how much time you need. You won't know what you don't know, if that makes sense. So take the time to figure that out with months or a year to spare, and then design your optimal study plan from there, whether it's spread out equally or staggered to ramp up right before your test.

Another important consideration when designing your schedule is what your other commitments are. Are you playing on a varsity sports team junior year? Are you designing an app, or have you convinced your parents to take you on a cross-country road trip in the name of college visits? Figure out what your competing commitments are so you won't find yourself overwhelmed by ACT prep. This mindset will help you find balance with your study plan and when choosing your test dates.

Be Thoughtful About Your Test Dates

I briefly touched on the typical schedule and prep hours for students. A lot of students take the real ACT for the first time in the fall of junior year, then again in the spring, and then for the final time in the fall of senior year if they still see room for improvement. This gives you three test dates, but you might want more to take the pressure off, get more real test experience, or build your scores up section by section.

Plus if you're super busy junior year, then you can move prep ahead and get your test scores all finished and done with well ahead of your college deadlines. Even if you haven't studied some concepts extensively in school yet, like geometry or trigonometry, you can reinforce what you do know and get a headstart on new concepts. There are a lot of considerations when choosing your test dates, and by being thoughtful about each one you can devise a schedule customized to you. To keep all this straight, I can't emphasize enough the importance of writing everything down.

Not you!

Keep Track of Everything

As a homeschooled student, you might not have the same college-bound peer group or guidance counselors to be by your side and keep you updated throughout the college process (though you can make an appointment with a counselor at your local high school). That's why you might have some extra responsibilities when it comes to keeping track of your test dates, prep, deadlines, and application materials. Make sure you research your colleges' policies about standardized testing, expectations for scores, and any ACT-based scholarships they offer.

Create a system of organization, whether you use binders or online tools like Google Calendar and Google Docs, to write everything down, create and stick to your schedule, and remember all those passwords you'll be creating for sites like the ACT and The Common Application.

As a homeschooled student, you've probably developed a great deal of independence in your learning and organization, and you can draw on this strength as you work towards your post-high school goals. Not only will this help you get a strong ACT score and admission to your dream school, but these skills will help you be a successful and self-directed college student capable of achieving great things.

What's Next?

The best ACT practice questions come straight from the testmakers. Download official ACT practice tests with questions from previously administered tests here.

Are you not sure when you should sign up for your first ACT? Should you take one just for the experience, or wait until you've put in some serious studying? Learn when to take your first official ACT here.

Wondering what kind of science you need to study for the ACT Science section? Read about the only actual science you need to know (and how this section is more like the Reading section than you might think).