If you read the some of the test prep books on the market on how to ace the ACT Science, you’ll notice a strategy they all share in common: don’t read first. The basic idea is that you should read the questions first, and then let them guide you to the places in the passage that contain the information you need. This strategy strikes me as a bit odd: doesn’t it put the student at risk of not understanding what they need to do?
At its core, this strategy assumes that there can be a difference between how a test is “designed” and how a test should be “taken.” My argument is that by creating a strategy that diverges from the intent of the test, tutors and test prep professionals are opening the possibility that a student will not see the things that they need to see, since they are going to be focused on gaming the test in the way that they were taught. (Not to mention that they will learn markedly less in general if they approach the section with this strategy.). A good ACT Science strategy, just like a good ACT Reading strategy, should have an emphasis on understanding and purpose.
The ACT Science section, like many of the ACT sections overall, has an emphasis on ‘search and find,’ or locating specific data points or trends in the material. In addition to this, the ACT Science tests whether you understand the nature of the scientific process by asking test takers to analyze different experiments or compare alternate theories and explanations.
As you can see, if you approach the questions from a ‘no reading first’ strategy, you will not fully appreciate what the ACT is supposed to test. While search and find questions may be tackled more or less reliably in this fashion, by not reading you are missing the purpose of an experiment as well as its findings. Even if you get questions right, it will be through a side-stepping of the skill that the test writers are looking to test. (Imagine pursuing a science degree with this sort of training under your belt?)
But even from an accuracy standpoint, it’s not entirely clear that this is the best approach. One of the main difficulties in the ACT Science section is being able to understand what’s going on in a passage where you may not understand many of the words, or have a deep background knowledge of the subject. If you don’t actually read the passages, you will be even more in the dark on what is happening! Many of the questions will reference compound names, formulas, explanations, etc., and it can be potentially bewildering to the reader to try to make sense of those things and answer the questions.
It’s understandable why tutors and test prep companies would come up with this strategy: the ACT Science has a huge time crunch (even without reading the 6 passages, you have approximately 53 seconds per question). But instead of trying to sidestep this issue by gaming the test, students should instead be taught how to read quickly, how to pick out trends while they read, and how to pick out which things are more important than others. If you approach the passages reading like this, you will notice that you can answer most of the questions almost instantly; you’ll understand what things are, and you’ll understand what things should be.
Stat tuned for another post on how to read ACT Science passages efficiently. Knowing what to focus on and what not to get caught up in will allow you to get the key information in a timely fashion and move on the questions with the advantage of having a broad understanding of the passages and a knowledge of where to look for the specific details needed to answer some of the questions.