SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips

No one likes to make mistakes. However, you cannot ignore the questions you miss, or you will not improve. In this article, I will help you figure out the mistakes you are making on ACT Science questions, and I will give you some ACT Science tips and ACT Science strategies to fix your mistakes.

We've written at length about the June 6 SAT misprint snafu and SAT testing center problems. Our SAT experts who took the SAT on June 6th noted major problems in how the test was administered, leading to potential imbalances in test performance and equality.

We get to add to our grammar knowledge. Get excited! Parallel structure questions on the SAT Writing section are fairly common. Fortunately, parallel structure is a somewhat easy to comprehend grammatical rule. Once you understand the rule, you should be able to correctly answer any parallel structure question on the SAT. 

So, let’s master another rule and boost your SAT Writing score with these tips and strategies.

Idiom questions on the ACT are different from the other grammar questions on the ACT. Why? Idiom questions don’t conform to specific rules. You have to rely on your intuitive grasp of English and your familiarity with certain phrases.

Because you’re likely to encounter at least a few idiom questions on the ACT English test, I’ll provide you with some information about idioms that should help you raise your ACT English score.

The format of the ACT English is pretty weird and unusual, compared to most of your high school English tests. If you want to succeed on this section, you have to know how to approach its unique passage-based structure.

"And how," you ask, "do I do that?" Always, always, have a plan.  

In this guide, I'll show you the best way to read and answer ACT english questions when you attack the passage. These strategies come from my experience working personally with nearly a hundred students. You should apply them in your own ACT English practice to help you prepare thoroughly for test day.

One of comedian Groucho Marx's most famous jokes involves a pachyderm and some sleepwear.

"One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas," he says. "How he got in my pajamas I don't know!"

This joke is a play on a grammatical error called a misplaced modifier. 

The modifier errors on the ACT English may not be quite as funny as Groucho's, but you still have to understand how they work. To that end, we'll be covering both the basic grammatical concepts behind faulty modifiers and how to apply that knowledge on the test:

Only have a couple days left before the SAT? There’s still time to improve your scores! A few hours of focused prep can make a big difference in your test performance, especially if you have obvious mistakes that you haven't noticed.

Here are some guidelines that will help you design a last minute SAT study plan that works for you. I'll also give you a bunch of last minute SAT tips to raise your score.

What's the difference between a period and a semicolon? Between a comma and a dash? These questions bedevil not just students, but even professional writers. Punctuation can be one of the weirdest, most confusing parts of writing.

However, the ACT English section isn't writing—it's a multiple choice test, which means that every question has to have only one correct answer. The ACT tests a specific set of punctuation rules, most of which deal with commas. I covered commas in a separate post—here I'll be explaining the other punctuation rules you need to know, which deal with apostrophes, semicolons, colons, and dashes.

Pronoun agreement errors are some of the most common on the SAT Reading & Writing section, and they can be confusing because people often misuse pronouns, especially when we speak. In fact, I just made a pronoun mistake: can you spot it?

Take a closer look at the second half of my first sentence: "people often misuse pronouns, especially when we speak." Who is "we" referring to here: "people." However, the correct pronoun for the third person plural is they. The correct version is "people often misuse pronouns, especially when they speak."

On SAT Reading & Writing, you'll be expected to spot many such errors. We'll be covering both the basic SAT writing rules regarding pronouns you need to know and the common mistakes you'll see on the test:

The Code

The universal SAT Home School Code, needed to register for the SAT and applicable anywhere in the USA, is 970000.

When you use this, it means that the score results will be sent directly to your home. Using this code simply indicates, for the sake of data gathering, that you are a home schooled student. Home schooled students, on average, score higher on the SAT than their public school counterparts. This code is the College Board's way of tracking the results accurately. Also, the SAT compares you to the local average, but as a home schooled student, you won't provide an accurate representation of the local district scores.

However, if you want to, you can use the local high school's code as well.

What registration code to you use to register for the SAT as a homeschooled student, and what considerations should you remember? Read our guide to get the details.

How do homeschooled students register for the ACT, and what is the ACT homeschool code? What important considerations should you keep in mind? Find out here.

If you don’t have much time left before the ACT, you may be wondering how you can maximize your scores with a short term study plan. If you’re looking for a big score improvement and you only have a few days before the test, you might not be able to reach your goal this time, but you can get a good head start towards it (and you’ll be better prepared to study harder before your next test session).

But if you only need to improve by one or two points, really intense studying for a few hours could get you where you want to be, if you have some clear weaknesses you didn't know about!

In this article I'll show how to create a last minute ACT study program and give last minute ACT tips to boost your score.