Looking for official ACT practice? The Official ACT Prep Guide is a great resource.
In this article, I'll provide a review of the current Official ACT Prep Guide, including positives and negatives of the new guide and whether or not you should buy it to help you through the study process.
What’s in The Official ACT Prep Guide?
The book is organized into five parts, which each are further divided into smaller chapters. The five parts of the book are:
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Part One: Getting Acquainted with the ACT Test (general study strategies and test-taking tips, explanation of the format and what’s covered on the test)
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Part Two: Taking and Evaluating Your First Practice Test (diagnostic practice test along with an explanation of how to use your results to identify weak areas)
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Part Three: Improving Your Score (test-taking strategies for each section of the exam)
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Part Four: Taking Additional Practice Tests (five additional practice tests for you to take after you’ve evaluated your mistakes and done more prep)
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Part Five: Moving Forward to Test Day (shows you how to sign up for the test and what to expect on test day)
There are six full practice tests included in this guide (as well as a 7th available online), counting the initial practice test that you'll use to diagnose your mistakes in part two. The online bonus content includes 400 extra official ACT practice questions (100 each for English, Math, Reading, and Science). In the next section, I'll go through my full review of the book with extensive details on its strengths and weaknesses.
The Official ACT Prep Guide Review
There are many reasons to like or dislike this version of the Red Book. I'll start with the positive attributes of the guide and move onto its not-so-awesome qualities.
Pros
Smart Overall Structure
The order of the chapters in the book corresponds to when you should take each step in the review and testing process. This book understands that the best way to guarantee improvement over time is to take a practice test, evaluate your mistakes, study the content that's relevant to your mistakes, and take another practice test to see if you’ve improved. You'll learn exactly how to begin studying and which steps you should take along the way to make sure you’re improving.
Good Advice on Scores and What They Mean
The guide walks you through scoring your practice tests accurately, and it gives you a table of percentiles so you can see how your scores compare to those of other students. It also does a good job of explaining how to judge your scores based on where you plan on applying to college and how much you improve from test to test. Learning to set appropriate goals is a huge aspect of studying for standardized tests that can be overlooked in some prep books.
Abundant Test-Taking Tips
There are many test-taking tips for each section of the ACT included in this book. Some tips can seem a bit repetitive (sometimes it seems like they’re just filling up space), but most are solid pieces of advice. For ACT English, helpful tips listed in the book include considering the context of the question before choosing an answer, rereading the sentence using the answer you've selected, exercising caution with two part questions, and paying attention to the writing style.
Cons
Dull Style
This guide is dryly written, with little in the way of images, graphics, or differentiated headings to break up the text. There are sporadic efforts to be more engaging, but it’s definitely not the most student-friendly prep guide. Adding to this, Part 1 has an overview of the test that includes long lists of concepts covered by each section that could be condensed. The book makes the test seem way too intimidating and overwhelming (more on this in the next point).
Complicates the Material
While it's great that there are abundant test-taking tips included in this book, they aren't always presented in the best way. The tips are a bit hard to digest and use in practice on the test. While question examples are given to show how the tips work in some cases, these examples are not as abundant as they should be.
This book falls short specifically in demystifying the science section. The main issue with this section for most students is that it looks super intimidating, and it's easy to feel overwhelmed. To overcome this, you need to learn to pick out the most important details and ignore extra information that’s just there to distract you. This guide makes the science section look scarier and more "sciencey" even though in reality it’s more about reading comprehension than scientific knowledge.
Answer Explanations are Lacking
Math and science question explanations are laid out in a way that makes them confusing and difficult to think through. Here's an example of what the answer explanations for math questions look like:
As you can see, there are rarely any images to guide you in your understanding or even much room for the text to breathe at all. Everything starts to blur together into a mass of unintelligible math-like word goop. If you're already having trouble with the Math section, these sorts of answer explanations probably won't clear things up.
The guide also makes some assumptions about how much you know about the content. If you didn't even understand where to begin in answering these math questions, the answer explanations provided aren't too enlightening. It would be helpful if they at least indicated the page in the book where you could find additional details on how to solve these types of problems.
Not Enough Guidance on Understanding Mistakes
The book tells you how to understand your mistakes, but it could have a more consolidated system to help you go through and diagnose them. An organized chart where you could record your findings would be better than just saying "put a checkmark next to the mistakes you made" and listing potential mistakes for each section.
There are also no direct actionables that go along with each type of mistake. The guide doesn’t tell you which page to turn to if you have a certain problem. It would be great to know where to find advice that corresponds to the errors you made in each section. The tips for the Reading section also don’t elaborate on different ways to approach passages , which can be a huge problem for people on that section and should be addressed more comprehensively.
It would be a shame to burrow down into your mistakes only to reach a dead end.
Should You Get This Guide?
You should get this book if you’re new to the ACT. It's a thorough summary of everything you need to know about the most up-to-date version of the test, even if has its imperfections.
You also could decide to get the Official ACT Prep Guide book if you want to practice your essay-writing skills using new prompts that align with the current version of the ACT. There haven't been many official ACT essay prompts publicly released, and if you're struggling with the essay, four extra prompts to practice with could prove extremely valuable.
If you're confident about self-guided studying and are just looking for more practice questions, it might be worth getting this ACT prep book. There aren't that many full, publicly released official ACT practice tests out there, so the fact that this book has six of them makes it particularly valuable. An alternative would be to get the 3rd Edition of the Real ACT Prep Guide, which has more original practice materials, and supplement it with free online resources (particularly for ACT Writing).
One of the practice tests in this guide is the rebellious twin of the last two practice tests in the 3rd Edition. It may have changed its hairstyle, but the same DNA is still there. Side note: If anyone had natural eyelashes that were this long, it would be a truly terrifying sight to behold.
How to Get the Most Out of The Official ACT Prep Guide
The best way to ensure that you're getting the most out of the guide is to go through it in chronological order. First, read the basic tips in chapter two so you can get a handle on the basics of how the test works. Then, take the first practice test and go through your mistakes.
Go on to use the content sections of the book and any other resources on hand to study the areas that need the most work. When you feel that you've addressed your mistakes and are confident that your results will reflect your newfound expertise, take a second practice test to see if you've made significant improvements.
Note that the most recent version of The ACT Black Book, a resource that we recommend alongside the Official ACT Prep Guide for the best strategic test-taking advice, is tailored to the practice questions in an older version of the guide. The main upshot of this is that there are no answer explanations in the Black Book for questions in the fourth practice test of The Official ACT Prep Guide (since previous additions did not have this test). The tips can still be helpful, but this is something to keep in mind so you aren't confused when you can't match questions to explanations using the newest Black Book and Official ACT Prep Guide editions.
What's Next?
Not sure what score you should be aiming for on the ACT? Learn how to calculate a target score that makes sense based on your college goals.
Did your ACT test date sneak up on you? Check out our 10-day prep plan for advice on how to cram for the ACT and potentially raise your score by four composite points!
If you still have quite a bit of time before the test, read this guide on how long you should study for the ACT so you can come up with a solid study schedule.
