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TOP 10 WAYS TO BEAT COLLEGE STRESS – pt 2

By crystal morgan posted May 9, 2012

After making the most of ACT questions and practice tests, you aced the ACT. You wrote terrific application essays, and did so well in your college admissions interviews, you had your pick of schools. Now, there are more tests ahead of you as an undergrad – not just French exams and history quizzes, but also physical, mental, and emotional stuff that will challenge you in ways you probably haven’t experienced yet.

In Part 1 of this article, we learned to keep busy with campus events to avoid homesickness; call old friends to feel connected and grounded; follow a schedule to keep on track; get away to a quiet spot to be alone; and visit the campus health center for more options. Here are five more ways to beat stress:

6. Keep in Touch with Mom and Dad

You’ll be dealing with lots of feelings about leaving home – excitement, apprehension, curiosity, insecurity, and plain old homesickness. And guess what? Your classmates feel the same way. So when you freak out as soon as your family drives from your new dorm – remember you’re not alone and you’ll probably see your family soon. Even if you don’t head home for the holidays, you can keep in touch with calls, emails, letters, and care packages (which you can hint about whenever you call).

7. Dorm Sweet Home

With your schedule of classes, study time, and free time posted on your wall and keeping you on track, the rest of your dorm room should be a place of comfort and retreat. After a long day of lectures, study groups, and/or exams, de-stressing will be a lot easier if you can collapse in your old beanbag with your grandma’s quilt. Fill your space with favorite photos, books, and posters. Whether you relax with old movies or Xbox 360, you’ll be able to take a deep breath and re-charge in your home away from home.

8. In with the Good, Out with the Bad

Meditation can be as simple as closing your eyes and focusing on your breath for ten minutes. You don’t need a special outfit and a CD of seagulls – just sit in a quiet place, in a comfortable chair, and think of nothing but your breath going in and out. You can seriously improve your mood, concentration, and level of stress by thinking: “I’m breathing out the nasty stress…I’m breathing in peace of mind…”. Read more »

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TOP 10 WAYS TO BEAT COLLEGE STRESS – pt 1

By crystal morgan posted May 7, 2012

You aced the ACT, after making the most of ACT questions, test prep, and practice tests. You wrote terrific application essays to the best schools for your field of interest. And you did so well in your college admissions interviews, you had your pick of schools.

Now, there are more tests ahead of you as an undergrad – not just English exams and biology quizzes, but also physical, mental, and emotional stuff that will challenge you in ways you probably haven’t experienced yet. Here are ten ways to beat stress in college:

1. Do Your Thing…But Maybe Not Everything

To keep your mind off missing home, keep yourself busy with orientation parties, campus events, and dorm mixers. The beginning of the year is a great time to check out lots of clubs and meet lots of people – but it’s also a stressful time if you’re constantly “on.” Don’t try to jump in and join everything – and don’t worry about finding your place and your people immediately – or you’ll totally drain your batteries. Relax. Be patient. You will feel at home, eventually.

2. Phone-a-Friend

While you’re having a terrific time exploring the campus, checking out organizations, and making new friends, you’re probably also going to have some lonely days and boring nights. When you have a rough day – or week! – that’s when it really helps to call or IM an old friend. Your high school and childhood friends know you best, and they might be the best people to get you feeling connected and grounded again.

3. Overworked? Don’t Get Overwhelmed

First: Check out the locations of your classes and how long it takes to get to each one, so you don’t show up late, breathless, and stressed. Second: Every prof seems to think that his or her class is your only one, and the work will be piled on accordingly – but the workload should balance out, and even if it doesn’t, your ability to handle it will improve. Third: Create a schedule of all your classes, study time, and free time and post it in your room. Stay on top of it, and you won’t get overwhelmed by it. Read more »

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Top 10 tips for ACT English, Part 2

By jill muttera posted April 5, 2012

Test prep for the ACT involves not just practicing ACT questions, but also learning strategies for different question types. Apply the rest of these top 10 writing tips to the ACT to improve your score and your chances of getting into the best schools.

6. Make sure parallelism is used. Parallelism is a grammatical principle that becomes easier to spot the more you see it and get familiar with it. For a sentence to be parallel, the clauses within it must have matching structure. Here’s an example of a sentence that isn’t parallel:

My favorite things to do are running, swimming, and to read.

The first two items in the series are in gerund form (running and swimming), and the third item is in infinitive form. To make this sentence parallel, change “to read” to “reading.”

Here’s another ACT English practice question for more test day practice! Read more »

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When is the ACT offered in 2012?

By crystal morgan posted August 15, 2011

The ACT is offered 6 times a year in most states. Before you schedule your ACT test you should be aware of the college application deadlines and what it means for rolling admissions and early action deadlines. You should give yourself enough time for ACT test prep to give you the best advantage in achieving the highest ACT score possible.

2012 ACT test dates:

Exam Date: Register By: Late Registration:

*2/11/2012 1/13/2012 1/20/2012

4/14/2012 3/09/2012 3/23/2012

6/09/2012 5/04/2012 5/18/2012

9/08/2012 TBD TBD

10/27/2012 TBD TBD

12/08/2012 TBD TBD

Test your ACT skills by answering this ACT reading question. Good luck!

* Note: There will be no ACT test offered in New York for the February test date.

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ACT English: Editing Sentences and Paragraphs

By christopher babits posted July 27, 2011

Being able to edit sentences and paragraphs will be important for the ACT . You may be required to correct an error in a sentence. Or you may have to clarify a sentence. Whatever the case, you’ll have to get plenty of test prep to make sure you can answer this question type quickly on test day. For the best test prep around, go to Grockit to play fun, interactive games. You’ll be able to chat with other high school students preparing for the test and get help and advice from trained instructors. Before heading over to a game room, know these tips about answering editing sentences and paragraphs questions:

It’s all about context. It’ll be important to understand the context of the questioned word, phrase or sentence. For this reason, it’s very important to read the entire passage. Just looking at a single sentence—or even the sentences before and after the questioned word, phrase or sentence—is a recipe for getting the wrong answer.
Think about clarity. Your goal is to pick the most concise, clear sentence. If an answer choice has too many words, it’s likely a wrong answer choice. Your answer choice has to be descriptive, but always reexamine any answer choice that has fewer words.
Read every answer choice. Reading every answer choice is so important for editing sentence and paragraph questions. Sometimes there will be a few good answers. Your task, however, is to find the BEST answer choice. So make sure you read every answer choice, fighting the urge to choose the first answer choice that seems good.

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ACT English: Clarity

By christopher babits posted July 25, 2011

The ACT will test your ability to identify clear, concise sentences. This won’t be as easy as it sounds, as you’ll need to know rules about using the passive voice, proper noun, pronoun, and adverb agreement, among other writing conventions. Since there’s so many rules for writing, proper test prep is necessary to answer clarity questions on the ACT . Go to Grockit to get all the test prep you need, including receiving the help from trained instructors. And remember to use these strategies when answering clarity questions:

Read the entire passage. It’s important that you know the passage’s purpose, or main point. Sometimes the test-makers include a well-constructed sentence that makes little sense when inserted into the passage.
Avoid the passive voice. The passive voice (“was going to” and “were traveling to” are two examples) isn’t as clear as the active voice (“went to” and “traveled to”). Whenever you see the passive voice in an underlined sentence or phrase, see if there’s a better answer choice using the active voice.
Noun placement at the beginning of the sentence. More than likely, a good sentence will have a noun very close to, if not at the beginning of, the sentence. If an answer choice has a noun near the beginning of the sentence, check to see if the rest of it makes sense.
Use process of elimination. Sometimes none of the answer choices look especially appealing. By using process of elimination, instead of random guessing, you should be able to narrow it down to the two you think are most correct. This will improve your chance at getting the question right.

Now, with these tips in mind, let’s try a sample question:

Grandeur and simple emotional appeal were already known to be the keys to the people’s musical appreciation by Alexus. Unfortunately, he was university trained, and copied the academic model instead. In the universities and cloisters, young novices’ first forays at composition evoke disinterest from stodgy monks who redirect them toward more complex and confusing music. Monks supply detailed theories, and novices are rewarded for improving his or her academic training, Alexus developed an understanding of how novice monks learn music in monasteries. His program was overlooked completely by the illiterate churchgoing peasants.

What change should be made to the underlined sentence?

NO CHANGE
As Alexus already knew, that grandeur and simple emotional appeal are the keys to the people’s musical appreciation.
Alexus already knew that grandeur and simple emotional appeal were the keys to the people’s musical appreciation.
The keys to the people’s musical appreciation, Alexus already knew that they were grandeur and simple emotional appeal.

Try this ACT English question for more practice!

The original sentence is convoluted and confusing. It uses the passive voice (“Were already known to be”) and puts the noun (Alexus) at the end of the sentence. Unless there are no better choices, we should eliminate this one. B isn’t much better than the original sentence, for the pronoun “that” is in a location where it’s difficult to know what “that” is referring to. We should eliminate it from our possible answer choices. If we move on to C, we get a reasonably good sentence. The noun (Alexus) is at the beginning of the sentence and the first verb (knew) is active. We should keep this and check the last choice. In D, we have a dangling modifier—no subject in a clause (“The keys to…appreciation”). For this simple reason, D cannot be the choice, leaving us with the correct answer—C!

As you can see, the ACT asks you to know a lot of rules about writing. To make sure you’re prepared for anything they may ask, go to Grockit and get as much test prep as you can. It’ll make test day go smoothly and help you get the score you want.

Find out how Grockit can help you use your study plan to stay on track and make sure you’ve mastered everything.

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ACT English: Introduction

By jordan schonig posted May 5, 2011

The ACT English test assesses your knowledge of grammar and writing skills. It is mostly a knowledge-based rather than a reason-based test, meaning that you really have to know the rules before you take it. While using techniques such as “listening” for the best sounding grammatical construction may help you here, the best approach to studying for the ACT English is to learn the grammar rules and become familiar with the rhetorical techniques that are tested.

Timing: The test is 45 minutes long and there are 75 questions to answer. That does seem a little intense, but you’ll soon realize that, while the time limit is an obstacle, it is certainly reasonable. Many of the grammar questions can be answered in a manner of seconds, while some rhetorical strategy questions may require at least one minute.

Try this ACT English practice question and use the timer provided.

Format: It’s most important that you familiarize yourself with the format of the ACT English, especially if you are familiar with the format of the SAT Writing. The SAT Writing and ACT English cover many of the same skills, but the formats are quite different. Rather than use individual multiple choice questions that feature isolated sentences with grammar problems, the ACT English provides long passages that suffer from errors throughout. The test is broken down into five passages, each with 15 questions.

Underlines: Grammar errors are underlined and assigned numbers that correspond to the question number. Choose the best replacement of (or don’t change) the underlined word or phrase based on rules of grammar, punctuation, syntax, and rhetoric.

Boxes: Boxed numbers in the passage refer to sections of the passage or the passage as a whole, not individual words or phrases. For these, read the question and choose the best answer based on rhetorical reasoning.

The following images are taken from a Grockit ACT practice passage. Note that, in this example, numbers 3 and 4 are underline questions that simply ask for the best version of the underlined phrases, while numbers 5 and 15 will provide questions that test rhetorical skills concerning the preceding paragraph or sentence.

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ACT English: Purpose

By jordan schonig posted April 11, 2011

On the ACT English, purpose questions ask you to examine the entire passage and identify the main idea or the author’s purpose. Because purpose questions require a thorough understanding of the entire passage, students tend to find these particular questions difficult. While these questions may be daunting, there are a few strategies we can use to increase our chances of choosing the right answer.

Luckily, there are only about one or two purpose questions in any given English passage, and they’re pretty easy to identify. A purpose question might look like this:

“Suppose the writer intended to write an essay that discusses… …Did the writer fulfill that goal?”

Answers to purpose questions will usually be in “yes or no” form. Each answer will say “yes” or “no,” followed by a qualifying statement that justifies the ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. For example, if the passage is an essay about the Wright brothers’ invention of the airplane, and the question asks “suppose the writer intended to write an essay that discusses the complexities of airplane physics,” then you’d see four possible answers to that question that also try to justify that answer.

Check back to Grockit’s ACT and SAT blog for up to date test and strategy information.

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ACT English Overview

By vivian kerr posted March 1, 2011

The ACT English section will always be the first test of the ACT . It is 75 questions and will take 45 minutes. The official ACT guide breaks down the tested concepts into 2 categories with 3 sub-skills. You will receive a subscore for each category and a total score based on all questions.

Usage/Mechanics (40 questions)

- Punctuation (10 questions)

- Grammar and Usage (12 questions)

- Sentence Structure (18 questions)

Rhetorical Skills (35 questions)

- Strategy (12 questions)

- Organization (11 questions)

- Style (12 questions)

To study for these, familiarize yourself with English grammar and usage, and with the most-tested errors. Here is a good starter list of some of the errors you can expect to see on the ACT English test:

Looking for some ACT practice? Try this ACT English question on Grockit.

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ACT English: Prepositions Usage

By jordan schonig posted February 13, 2011

The ACT English will sometimes test your knowledge of preposition usage; knowledge is the keyword here, since you really cannot reason your way through the intricacies of preposition usage. For this reason, we often refer to preposition questions as “idiom” questions; simply put, an idiom is a recognized grammatical construction that is a rule simply because of tradition. The idiom constitutes the ultimate tautology: we say something a certain way because, well, that’s how we say it.

Preposition usage is notoriously arbitrary, or, as the test-writers might say, preposition usage is idiomatic. Why do I listen “to” the radio instead of listen “at” the radio? We say “listen to” because that is how English speakers have said it for hundreds of years. We like it that way, and we are not willing to change.

For some students, idiom errors can be the easiest to spot on the exam. To these students, an idiom error sticks out like a sore thumb. When they read something like “listen at the radio,” they hear dissonance. The only way to restore grammatical harmony is to replace the grating “at” with the soothing “to.” Balance is restored.

Not everybody thinks this way. For many who learned English as a second language, and even for those who have a purely logical–as opposed to intuitive–understanding of language, idiom errors are extremely difficult to detect. After all, there is no logical explanation for why we say “listen to” instead of “listen at.”

Try this ACT preposition practice question!

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