Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Science: ACT Science — a timed set: three mini-passages at one minute per question, ACT Science — data, design and…
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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 toward 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 math — 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 program 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 points 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.
Some sets are built on drawn figures, and some are not. Several give you real figures to read — line graphs, bar graphs, scatterplots, a graph with two vertical axes, and pairs of a table and a figure that have to be read together. The rest describe every data set in full in words — the variable, the units and every value — which trains the reasoning without the eye.
Use the worded sets for the judgment — what a trend supports, what a control was for, where two accounts part company — and the drawn ones for reading figures; then practice whole passages under a clock on ACT's own free practice tests.
ACT® is a registered trademark of ACT Education Corp., which is not affiliated with and does not endorse Zestly. All questions here are original and reproduce no official ACT material.
