Award-Winning ACT Reading Tutors serving Cambridge

Friday was a great session for the student! We spent a lot of time on math and English, and finished with a little science. I think across the board, when she takes an extra second to break down what the question is asking, her accuracy improves greatly. She's showing that she's comfortable with math concepts and grammar, but occasionally she'll rush a question and make a small mistake. Since she has extra time for the test, I would always urge her to take advantage of it and always take the extra second or two. I think she's becoming much more comfortable with the science sections, and her accuracy has gone up greatly in that section. As always, she is very focused on improving her scores and comes in ready to work. Next time, we'll spend a little time talking about some general tips to use on the writing portion.

The student and I worked on reading today, beginning with a 12 question practice test. He answered the questions in good time. We pinpointed whatever problems he ran into, as he was almost always able to get the right answer after the first attempt. We then looked more closely at particular kinds of questions, like questions asking the reader to infer something and questions that asked about a specific word in the passage, and went over some tips to answer those questions correctly.

Today the student did diagnostics for the reading and English sections of the ACT. We went over strategies and common things he will see in each of those sections as well as the structure of the entire test. Next session we will work on math and science, and I will cover the general aspects of those sections as well.

We started the session going over the English test. I reminded the student that if an answer choice has 1 word that's wrong, then that cannot be the right answer. We went over the homework he completed for me. I encouraged him to make notes on the passages to help him answer the questions correctly. Then, we moved on to math. I reminded him of the strategy to plug in numbers and answer choices since he sometimes struggles with algebra. I instructed him that many of the algebra type problems in the ACT can be solved by plugging in the answer choices. I hope to see him use this strategy in the future. We ended the session by discussing the English section. I reviewed apostrophe use with him and encouraged him to read out the answers so he can hear how the sentence flows. I also reminded him to keep in mind the main ideas of paragraphs that are in question for the context and rhetorical revision questions.

Today, we started by going over a few reading passages. The student did really well on those, and I'll find some passages that are more difficult for next time. Then we did a significant amount of math problems over geometry. We covered the formulas he would need for coordinate plane questions, and just about everything he would need to be familiar with for questions involving circles. Next, we reviewed English and went over passive voice, parallel structure, and reviewed some concepts from last session. Finally, we covered a difficult science passage that he did really well with. For next time, I'll be sending an essay prompt for him to do before our next session, so that we can start by going over the writing section.

The student did a great job. She paid attention throughout the session as we went over her ACT math homework. Her raw score was a 36 which translates to about a 23 in the ACT scale.