This spring, I put up a series of posts with The Princeton Review’s signature SAT advice. Now, I’m showing the same love for the ACT.
I posted an introduction to the ACT last week. This week, I’m posting about an ACT strategy that we here at The Princeton Review call “triage.” For more information on this and other strategies, see our Cracking the ACT guidebook.
What exactly is triage?
Triage is the medical term that describes the technique used by emergency-room doctors when they have several emergencies at the same time. To save the most lives, doctors separate patients into three groups: those who will die regardless of intervention, those who require immediate medical attention, and those who can afford to wait a little while.
How does this have anything to do with the ACT?
Like an emergency-room doctor, you’ll be working with a limited amount of time when you take the ACT. One of your jobs on test day will be to use your time in the most efficient way possible.
On the ACT, all of the questions—easy and hard—count for the same number of points. This being the case, you shouldn’t waste time trying to answer the difficult questions before you’ve answered all of the easy questions.
Unfortunately, on the ACT, the easy and hard questions are all mixed up. This means you cannot just work through all the problems in the order they’re given.
When you perform triage on the ACT, you adapt the strategy used by emergency-room doctors. See that really tough algebra problem sitting over there? Forget it; it’s a goner. How about that problem on frequency and amplitude? That would take far too long, and even if you got it right, it would still only be worth one point. Now this problem involving basic arithmetic—this is something different altogether. It’s an easy question, so you should do it right away.
Now, Later, Never
Do you want to do this problem now? That is the question you should constantly be asking yourself during the exam. If you finish reading a problem and immediately know how to solve it, then of course you should do it right away.
But what if you finish reading a problem and you aren’t really certain how to begin? If you think you might be able to figure it out later, circle the question number and move on. This might seem hard to do at first, but it is one of the central tenets of good test taking, and it gets easier with practice. You aren’t necessarily skipping the problem forever. You’re just putting it at the back of the line.
However, if the problem is a goner and you’re sure you’ll never figure it out, you should fill in your best guess and forget it (unlike the SAT, the ACT does not penalize you for guessing). There are other problems out there waiting for you; don’t worry about the ones you just can’t do.
Two Passes
You should do each section in two passes. During the first pass, the object is to nail every single question you can answer. By answering all the questions of which you’re sure, you will never have to hear the words, “Okay, pencils down,” and know that there were several more questions you could have done if only there had been more time. You will have already done them.
The Second Pass
After you’ve finished everything you can do on the first pass and guessed on all questions that you’re sure you can’t do, come back to the questions you circled for a second pass. Again, think ACT triage. Most of the “patients” in your emergency room have now been handled. Look over the remaining problems and ask yourself the same question: Which one do I want to do now? Obviously, none of them struck you as easy the first time or you would have answered on the first pass. On the contrary, among the remaining problems, some are probably more likely bets than others.
Sometimes when you read a question again, you suddenly realize what the point of the question really is. This will save you from having that “Oh, yeah!” revelation on the car ride home. But other times when you re-read a question, you suddenly realize that you will hate this question for the rest of your life and you never, ever want to see it again. Fine. Throw it to the back of the list or make a guess.
Sometimes you reject a question initially because you think it will take too much time. Well, now you have time. You’ve already locked in all the sure points, so maybe this is the question to do now.
Scoring More Points with ACT Triage
Deciding whether you will do a question now, later, or never is a crucial part of improving your results on the ACT. The whole point of ACT triage is to help you invest your time more profitably. By utilizing the two-pass approach and the concept of triage, you will, unlike most test takers, spend the majority of your time working on questions that seem easy or at least doable. As a result, you will score more points.
Guessing
As you read this post, you may have wondered about the best and most efficient way to guess on the problems that you choose not to solve. Guessing on the ACT is so important that it gets its own strategy: the process of elimination. I’ll discuss this strategy next week.
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