The enhanced act score calculator came out this week with pretty major changes to pacing and the number of questions per passage, leaving many students wondering what’s going on. If you’re prepping for the next test available, avoid using dated material from last year—the new version requires updated strategies to achieve your dream ACT scores. Learn these changes in depth, focus on how to prepare with the right materials, and don’t get caught off guard on test day.
Main Changes to the Enhanced ACT Score Calculator
The biggest change is shaving off a whole hour—the test went from 3 hours, 5 minutes to 2 hours, 5 minutes, making it a lot shorter. Each subject got impacted: math dropped from 60 to 45 questions but gained time, while English went from 75 questions to 50 questions.
The science section became optional and won’t count toward your act composite score. However, I highly recommend students take science if they’re interested in STEM fields or majoring where science important. Is 19 a good act score matters less when programs review that optional data.
Other changes are coming across sections, including adding a statement of question to each item per release notes, making questions a lot more clear. They’re reducing length of English passages, adding argumentative essay content, and the new math section is reducing the number of answer choices from 5 to 4.
The reading section features reducing length of reading passages. For science, they’re ensuring at least one passage per exam addresses engineer and design topic about setting up experiment or proper experimental design. They’re increasing the number of questions requiring scientific background knowledge like acid scale (0 to 14) or parts of cell.
Overall, the main changes to the act score calculator mean increasing time per question across core sections, giving lot more time to work at a slower pace. But they’re not changing the difficulty of questions much, so mistakes get weighted a lot more—you’ll need to minimize mistakes and score almost perfect to want to score very high.
ACT Score Practice Tests
Start talking strategy: the AC didn’t write new tests but took old tests to basically reformat and fit the new structure. The four practice ACTs available in the red book (official one from ACT) are unfortunately just using reboots from ACT overtime changes.
Taking a full practice ACS is a very important part of the process. I definitely recommend you use carefully the four versions updated for new format, pacing, and structure. Please don’t sit down and spam all four right now—be smart about spacing these out.
Old ACT Practice Tests VS Enhanced ACT Score Calculator
What else should you use for practice tests? All old versions from AC are actually still pretty useful since the content of test stayed generally same—sorry, only pacing and structure changed, which means all practice questions from old ACTs remain really great to use when you’re doing prep.
I recommend students just updating the new timing you have on screen for these tests: the old version of English would have 45 minutes, math would have 60, Reading would have 35, and science would have 35—but use the new timing to basically give the same pacing you’d would see on the new version of ACT.
You can use old ACTs with new timing to get more practice resource students can use that way, and other place to get extra practice tests comes from us at Prepro since we work with ACT as a partner—with that, AC gives us additional practice tests you can use within our platform that are not available in the two books I mentioned. Overall, some additional practice tests are available through ultimate ACT within what we sell, can see individual test explanations for all these tests we’re going through, explaining how to solve each question able to get maximum value.
Avoid Third-Party Practice Tests
Here’s one final piece of practice test advice: don’t use third-party practice tests from companies like Princeton Review, Kaplan, Mcgraon Hill, or anyone else because they’re not going to help you get prepared for test day—at Prepro, we only use practice tests written by A (the official ACT material) since they’re the only ones that are truly accurate to what A is going to feel like during actual testing. The problem with thirdparty tests written by external sources is they often have issues in terms of difficulty, scaling, and content alignment, generally speaking, which means using them for prep creates false expectations—again, just don’t use these practice tests when better options exist.
How to Actually Prepare
Just taking a bunch of practice tests won’t get ready you—I cannot emphasize this enough. Need to have a more structured way to go about this. Let’s talk how to prep each section: English, math, reading, science for ACT. All right, talk about how to actually prepare, not should not prepare.
English Section
Good news: if you took a practice test or real test and didn’t do super well on the English section, it’s my opinion this is the easiest one to skyrocket your score super fast. Start learning patterns of test through practicing—you don’t need to learn extensive content, just have to put together a plan, put in time, and get to your best scores ever.
Key Preparation Tips
Tip number one: give yourself three plus months to actually plan for the test, and tip number two is make sure you make ACT prep consistent—want to make sure you’re doing prep every single week. Again, give yourself time to prepare (course, as much time as you can).
Tip number three: be smart about when to take the ACT with what you’re saying you need time for prep (at minimum three to five hours per week). Make sure you’re considering know what activities like in football season, got basketball season, or got play going on right now.
Plan around those things so you can add in prep to your schedule in a realistic way—know a lot of you are doing this during junior year (course, it’s stressful with all the extra classes and coursework), or doing as a senior when you have college absters. Again, try to make sure you find time.
Math Timing Considerations
Math in ACT is very broad and challenging, going to cover stuff all the way up through end of pre-cal—be considerate about math timing if you're a weaker math student in regular math track. Might be helpful to give yourself some more time, look to take first ACT maybe in February or even in April.
Oppositely, if you're more of an honors math kid already taking AP Cal or AP math (honors, for example), you're good to go—nothing in Cal is going to help the ACT. Really weak in math? Be smart: giving yourself more time to prepare, even prepping over summer for seniors. Other one tip as we're going through math timing: be considerate about taking that test when taking courses align, and be smart about math.
Outro Sections
Hope you guys enjoyed this—if you have any questions around ACT prep, how to handle new ACT materials, or whatever else, let me know in the comments down below. Also, let me know if guys want to check out my math guide, reading guide, or English guide up here somewhere (don't know if you think it's pretty helpful).
For that, I'll also be able to learn you a bunch of grammar rules and more insights about new enhanced AC how to prep, plus some math stuff in there as well—again, let me help guide you guys to some great ACT scores. Will be dropping reading and science guide which has been highly requested, will work on making those later this week.
Guys who are studying for ACT can also be posting with new enhanced AC to keep you guys updated—Yeah, Again, guys have any questions, whatever you like or guys want to ask (anything), guys can leave a comment, try to answer them, or can hit me up on Instagram, will try and answer your DM. All right, thank you guys, see you in next one—this is Matt at Prep Pro, see you guys next time!