In This Chapter
Mellowing, chilling, and relaxing before and during the ACT
Identifying and sidestepping some easy ways to mess up your score
On the wall of our office, we have a padded cushion that’s imprinted with the words, “BANG HEAD HERE!” We’ve found that most of our students use it either to reduce stress (we guess one headache can replace another!) or — much more commonly — to express their exasperation over unnecessary, careless (we’re trying not to say it, but okay — dumb!) mistakes. Going through the material in this chapter about how to relax before and during the ACT and how to recognize and avoid common mistakes can prevent you from becoming a head-banger later.
Surviving the ACT with Four Stress-Busters
Most people are tense before a test and often feel butterflies dancing in their stomachs. The key is to use relaxation techniques that keep your mind on your test and not on your tummy. To avoid becoming paralyzed by a frustrating question during the test, we suggest that you develop and practice a relaxation plan (perhaps one that includes the techniques we describe in the following sections). At the first sign of panic, take a quick timeout. You’ll either calm down enough to handle the question, or you’ll get enough perspective to realize that it’s just one little test question and not worth your anguish. Mark your best guess and move on. If you have time, you can revisit the question later.
Practice a quick relaxation routine in the days before you take the exam so that you know just what to do when you feel panicky on test day.
Inhaling deeply
Stressing out causes you to tighten up and take quick breaths, which doesn’t do much for your oxygen intake. Restore the steady flow of oxygen to your brain by inhaling deeply. Feel the air go all the way down to your toes. Hold it and then let it all out slowly. Repeat this process again several times.
Stretching a little
Anxiety causes your muscles to get all tied up in knots. Combat its evil effects by focusing on reducing your muscle tension while breathing deeply. If you feel stress in your neck and shoulders, also do a few stretches in these areas to get the blood flowing. You can shrug your shoulders toward your ears, roll your head slowly in a circle, stretch your arms over your head, or even open your mouth wide as if to say “Ahhh.” (But don’t actually say it out loud.)
Thinking positive thoughts
Any time you feel yourself starting to panic or thinking negative thoughts, make a conscious effort to say to yourself, “Stop! Don’t dwell on anything negative.” Then switch over to a positive track. For example, suppose you catch yourself thinking, “Why didn’t I study this math more? I saw that formula a hundred times but can’t remember it now!” Change the script to, “I got most of this math right; if I leave my subconscious to work on that formula, maybe I’ll get it, too. No sense worrying now. Overall, I think I’m doing great!”
The ACT isn’t the end-all, be-all of your life. Cut yourself some slack on test day. You probably won’t feel comfortable about every question, so don’t beat yourself up when you feel confused. If you’ve tried other relaxation efforts and you still feel frustrated about a particular question, fill in your best guess and mark it in your test booklet in case you have time to review it at the end, but don’t think about it until then. Put your full effort into answering the remaining questions. Focus on the positive, congratulate yourself for the answers you feel confident about, and force yourself to leave the others behind.
Practicing visualization
Before the exam or during the break, practice visualization. Close your eyes and imagine yourself in the test room cheerfully looking at questions that you know the answers to, filling in the bubble grids to the right answers, finishing early, and double-checking your work. Picture yourself leaving the exam room all uplifted and then getting your scores and rejoicing several weeks later. Think of how proud of you your parents are. Imagine getting an acceptance letter from the college that fits you best. Picture yourself driving a fire-engine-red Ferrari ten years from now, telling the Time magazine reporter in the passenger seat that your success started with your excellent ACT scores. The goal here is to associate the ACT with good feelings.
Don’t practice visualization during the test; you just waste time and lose concentration.
Avoiding a Few Dumb Mistakes That Can Mess Up Your ACT
Throughout this book, you discover techniques for doing your best on the ACT. We’re sorry to say, however, that there are just as many techniques for messing up big-time on this test. Take a few minutes to read through these techniques in the following sections to see what dumb things people do to blow the exam totally. By being aware of these catastrophes, you may prevent them from happening to you. And no — the student who makes the greatest number of these mistakes doesn’t receive any booby prize.
Losing concentration
When you’re in the middle of an excruciatingly boring reading passage, the worst thing you can do is let your mind drift off to a more pleasant time (last night’s date, last weekend’s soccer game, the time that you stole your rival school’s mascot and set it on the john in the principal’s private bathroom — you get the point). Although visualization (picturing yourself doing something relaxing or fun) is a good stress-reduction technique to practice before the exam, it stinks when it comes to helping your ACT score during the test. Even if you have to pinch yourself to keep from falling asleep or flaking out, stay focused. The ACT is less than five hours of your life. You’ve probably had horrible blind dates that lasted longer than that, and you managed to survive them. This, too, shall pass.
Panicking over time
Every section on the ACT begins with directions and a line that tells you exactly how many questions are in the section and, therefore, how many minutes you have per question. The ACT is no big mystery. You can waste a lot of time and drive yourself crazy if you keep flipping pages and counting up how many more questions you have to do. You can do what you can do; that’s all. Looking ahead and panicking are counterproductive and waste time.
Messing up on the answer grid
Suppose that you decide to postpone doing Question 11, hoping that inspiration will strike later. But now you accidentally put the answer to Question 12 in the blank for Question 11 … and mess up all the numbers from that point on. After you answer Question 40, you suddenly realize that you just filled in Bubble Number 39 and have one bubble left — aaargh! Stroke City! It’s easy to say, “Don’t panic,” but chances are that your blood pressure will go sky-high, especially when you eyeball the clock and see that only one minute remains.
If you have a good eraser with you (and you should), the wrong answers on the answer grid should take only a few seconds to erase. But how on earth are you going to re-solve all those problems and reread and reanswer all the questions? You’re not; you’re going to thank your lucky stars that you bought this book and took the following advice: When you choose an answer, circle that answer in your test booklet first and then fill in the answer on the answer grid. Doing so takes you a mere nanosecond and helps you not only in this panic situation but also as you go back and double-check your work.
Rubbernecking
Rubbernecking is craning your neck around to see how everyone else is doing. Forget those bozos. You have too much to do on your own to waste precious seconds checking out anyone else. You don’t want to psych yourself out by noticing that the guy in front of you is done with his section and is leaning back whistling while you’re still sweating away. Maybe the guy in front of you is a complete moron and didn’t notice that the booklet has yet another page of problems. After you have the exam booklet in front of you, don’t look at anything but it and your watch until time is called.
Cheating
Dumb, dumb, dumb! Cheating on the ACT is a loser’s game — it’s just plain stupid. Apart from the legal, moral, and ethical questions, you can’t predict what types of grammatical mistakes will show up in the questions; what are you going to do, copy a textbook on the palm of your hand? All the math formulas that you need can’t fit onto the bottom of your shoe.
Worrying about previous sections
Think of the ACT as five separate lifetimes. You’re reborn four times, so you get four more chances to “do it right.” Every time the proctor says, “Your time is up. Please turn to the next test and begin,” you get a fresh start. The ACT rules are very strict: You can’t go back to a previous section and finish work there or change some of your answers. If you try to do so, the proctor will catch you and you’ll be in a world of hurt.
Worrying about the hard problems
The ACT contains some incredibly hard problems and questions. Forget about ‘em. Almost no one gets them right, anyway. A ridiculously few students receive 36 s every year, and if you get into the 30s, you’re in a superelite club of only a few percent of the thousands and thousands of students who take the ACT annually. Just accept the fact that you either won’t get to or can’t answer a few of the hard questions and learn to live with your imperfection. If you do go quickly enough to get to the hard questions, don’t waste too much time on them. See if you can use common sense to eliminate any answers. Then mark your best guess from the remaining choices. Keep reminding yourself that every question counts the same in a section, whether that question is a simple 1 + 1 = 2 or some deadly word problem that may as well be written in Lithuanian.
Forgetting to double-check
Mark in your test booklet questions you’re unsure about as you work through a section. If you finish a test early, go back and double-check the easy and medium marked questions. Don’t spend more time trying to do the hard questions. If a question was too hard for you five minutes ago, it’s probably still too hard for you. Your brain capacity likely hasn’t doubled in the last few minutes. If you made a totally careless or dumb mistake on an easy question, however, going back over the problem gives you a chance to catch and correct your error. You’re more likely to gain points by double-checking easy questions than by staring open-mouthed at the hard ones.
Every question counts the same. A point you save by catching a careless mistake is just as valuable as a point you earn, grunting and sweating, by solving a mondo-hard problem.