English Section of the ACT

The ACT English section lasts 45 minutes and contains 70 questions. It contains five passages with accompanying four-choice multiple-choice questions. This section asks you to review passages and ensure that the grammar and punctuation are correct and that each passage is well-organized and rhetorically sound.

The ACT English section tests two broad skill areas. Firstly, it tests your knowledge of usage and mechanics—grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure. Secondly, it tests your ability to make sure that a passage flows, makes sense, and effectively communicates a point. You’ll receive a subscore for both usage and mechanics and rhetorical skills when you get your ACT scores back.

Math Section of the ACT

The ACT Math section lasts 60 minutes and contains 60 five-choice multiple choice questions. Some of these questions will be presented as word problems, and others as pretty straightforward math problems. Some will have figures, graphs, or charts.

You should also be aware that the questions in the ACT Math section are loosely ordered by difficulty as well as content and subject matter. There are six main content areas tested on the math section: Pre-Algebra, Elementary Algebra, Intermediate Algebra, Coordinate Geometry, Plane Geometry, and Trigonometry. The first half of the test (questions 1-30) will have more algebra and pre-algebra questions, and the second half of the test will have more geometry and trigonometry.

Reading Section of the ACT

The ACT Reading section lasts 35 minutes and contains 40 questions. This section presents you with passages and then asks you multiple choice questions that test your reading comprehension skills. Can you correctly understand and interpret passages on a variety of subjects? Can you interpret the meaning both of small details and major theme in a passage? Can you analyze author’s purpose and tone? These are kinds of skills that the Reading section assesses.

The actual test will present you with four subsections: three will have longer passages, while one will have two paired passages. The subsections will come from four different subject areas and they always appear in the same order:

1. Prose Fiction/Literary Narrative: These are the kinds of fiction passages you’re probably encountering all the time in English class, including passages from literary memoirs.

2. Social Science: Nonfiction passages on soft sciences areas, like psychology, sociology, and education.

3. Humanities: This is a broad topic area that includes both personal nonfiction pieces like essays and memoirs and also nonfiction pieces on the arts, literature, and philosophy.

4. Natural Science: Nonfiction passages about hard sciences topics like biology, chemistry, physics, and medicine.

Any of the four topic areas could contain the paired passages, although it seems like literary fiction and humanities are the most frequent areas where you’ll see them.

Science Section of the ACT

The ACT Science section lasts 35 minutes and contains 40 questions. This section tests your scientific interpretation skills more than your pre-existing scientific factual knowledge and involves more reading—of passages, charts, and graphs—than anything else! Using the information in the passages, you’ll need to apply the scientific method, evaluate theories or hypotheses, and interpret data.

There are seven passages on the ACT Science section. You can expect to see three passages summarizing research and experiments (which may or may not include graphs and figures), three passages primarily made up of graphs and figures, and one paired passage set describing conflicting viewpoints on an issue. You can expect about 5-7 questions about each passage.

Writing Section of the ACT

The ACT Writing section lasts 40 minutes and tests your ability to write a clear, well-argued essay that analyzes an issue in relation to different viewpoints. You’ll then be evaluated along four domains and given a score from 1-6 by two graders, leading to a score out of 12.

You’ll first be presented with the topic. This will consist of two parts. First, you’ll get a paragraph introducing an issue of some global or universal importance. It will most likely be something that’s primarily philosophical in nature and it will be something that can be argued from multiple angles. After the initial introductory paragraph, you’ll be presented with three positions on the topic. The positions will be a little bit more nuanced that just “this thing is good” or “this thing is bad,” but they are only a couple of sentences each.

Then comes the actual prompt, which is always the same and describes the task you need to complete with the topic information. So what’s the actual task? You will need to write an essay that clearly states your perspective on the issue, analyzes the relationship between your perspective and at least one other perspective, and supports your own position with well-developed, logical support. You can choose to completely agree with one perspective, partially agree, or make your own different perspective.