Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Science: Science 1 — data, design and two scientists.
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Optional now, and not a science test — forty questions in forty minutes on reading data and judging experiments.
Science no longer counts towards the Composite. The ACT Composite is the average of English, Mathematics and Reading. If you take science you receive a standalone science score, and a STEM score that averages science with maths — but your headline number is decided without it.
Whether you take it may not be your decision. On a school or district administration it is set for you; on a national test date it is a choice. Find out which applies to you before planning, because the answer changes how much of this matters.
If a college on your list asks for the STEM score, or you are applying to an engineering or science programme that looks at it, this section is worth real time. If not, it is worth the time it takes to know what it is.
Almost no biology, chemistry or physics. Forty questions in forty minutes across three reporting categories:
Thirty-four of the forty questions are scored.
The outside knowledge required is small and shallow — roughly what a first year of high-school science covers, and it appears in only a handful of questions. Everything else is in front of you. A student who has never studied the topic can answer most of this section correctly, and a student who knows the topic well can still lose marks by answering from memory instead of from the figure.
Go to the questions first, and to the figures second. The prose around a data set is mostly setup; on most passages you can answer a majority of the questions from the axes, the units and the direction of the lines without reading a paragraph.
The conflicting-viewpoints passage is the exception. It is the one that is all prose and no figures, it takes the longest, and it is worth doing last. What it asks for is the precise point of disagreement — which is usually one step in a chain both scientists otherwise share, not the whole subject.
Read the axis labels and the units before anything else. More wrong answers on this section come from reading the right graph the wrong way than from any misunderstanding of science.
These carry no images. The real section is figures; here, every data set is described in full in words — the variable, the units and every value. That trains the reasoning and not the eye, which is half of what the section actually tests.
So use these for the judgement — what a trend supports, what a control was for, where two accounts part company — and practise reading real figures under a clock on ACT's own free practice tests.
