SAT/ACT Preparation - Part 1

About This Course

Making the decision to attend college is probably one of the most important decisions you’ll ever make, and your performance on college entrance exams is instrumental in determining your college choice. Universities and colleges throughout the U.S. require applicants to take the SAT or ACT as part of their evaluation package. This course will prepare you for both tests.

Both the ACT and the SAT contain verbal and math question types. SAT/ACT Preparation Part I will give you all the information you need to do well on the verbal questions of the ACT and the new SAT. The ACT verbal sections are called the Reading Test, the English Test, and the Science Test. The Reading Test and the English Test assess your knowledge of English usage, grammar, and reading comprehension. This course will provide you with a grammar and usage review specifically geared to the rules that you'll be tested on in the ACT. You'll also learn how to maximize your time on reading comprehension passages and the passages in the science test.

Beginning in 2005, the ACT began offering an optional essay test. If you choose to take the essay test, our course will show you how to do your best writing in the short period of time you'll be given.

In 2005, the SAT verbal questions also changed. The lessons in this course are designed to prepare you for those changes. The new verbal sections are called Writing and Critical Reading. The Critical Reading section consists of sentence completions and reading comprehension of both long and short passages. You’ll learn how to answer both types of questions in the most time-efficient manner. The SAT also contains a new Writing section, which includes a student-written essay and multiple-choice questions about grammar and English usage. This course will prepare you to write the type of essays that grading officials are looking for, and will provide you with a grammar and usage review that's specific to the rules you'll be tested on in the new SAT.

In addition to preparing you for specific question types on both exams, this course will give you pointers in time management, anxiety relief, scoring, and general standardized test-taking. Weekly assignments will encourage you to work with your fellow classmates and your instructor to maximize your performance on all aspects of the verbal questions of the ACT and SAT.

This course and its follow-up will prepare you to excel in all sections of the undergraduate college entrance exams and provide you with the means to achieve your best potential score!

About The Instructor

This course includes a knowledgeable and caring instructor who will guide you through your lessons, facilitate discussions, and answer your questions. The instructor for this course will be Scott and Lisa Hatch.

Scott Hatch has presented paralegal courses since 1980. He is listed in Who's Who in California, Who's Who Among Students in American Colleges and Universities, and has been named one of the Outstanding Young Men of America by the United States Jaycees. He was a contributing editor to The Judicial Profiler (McGraw-Hill and the Colorado Law Annotated (West/Lawyers Co-op)series, and editor of several award-winning publications. He is author of Paralegal Procedures and Practices, published by West Publishing, as well as books on mediation and legal investigation.

Lisa Zimmer Hatch, M.A., has been teaching legal certificate and standardized test preparation courses since 1987. She graduated with honors in English from the University of Puget Sound, and received her master's degree from California State University. She is co-author of numerous law and standardized test texts.

Syllabus

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

Week 1

Wednesday - Lesson 01

You may have heard that you can’t study for the ACT or SAT, but that’s just not true! There are a bunch of things you can do to prepare for the ACT and SAT, and the more time you spend preparing, the better your scores will be. In our first lesson, we'll go over all the things you need to know about the general makeup of both the ACT and SAT so you’ll know exactly what you’re getting into come test day. You’ll learn how to relax when you start feeling panicky, how to eliminate the wrong answers the tests try to entice you into choosing, how to guess when you aren't sure of the right answer, and how much time to spend on each question. And, if you aren't familiar with the kinds of questions that test your verbal skills, you’ll know exactly what to expect once you’ve completed this lesson.

Friday - Lesson 02

You’ve been reading since first grade, but that’s not enough experience to get you ready for the ACT and SAT passage-based reading questions. There’s more to these babies than just reading a passage and working through the related questions, and after this lesson, you'll have the tools you need to develop your own personal reading strategy. You'll learn how to glide through even the most tiresome reading topics by focusing on what’s important and ignoring what isn't. You'll find out how to eliminate answers that hook other unprepared test-takers. Then you'll see how to spot the distracters the test-makers use to make wrong answers seem right.

Week 2

Wednesday - Lesson 03

Knowledge is power, but practice makes perfect! In this lesson, we'll steer through ACT reading comprehension passages that have appeared on past tests to give you a step-by-step approach for getting the most information from the passages in the least amount of time. You’ll practice your skills on actual ACT reading test questions, and have the opportunity to discuss your efforts with your instructor and other classmates.

Friday - Lesson 04

Today, you'll rehearse for your SAT passage reading performance by completing practice tests created by actual SAT test-makers. You’ll learn the most efficient way to read through SAT passages, and you’ll get a detailed analysis of reading questions. You’ll know just what a question is looking for and how to weed through all of the possible answer choices to pick out the right ones.

Week 3

Wednesday - Lesson 05

The SAT sentence completion questions test your reading ability and your knowledge of vocabulary. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to improve your vocabulary without memorizing boring word lists. You’ll also get the tactics you need to dissect each sentence to extract its exact meaning so you'll know just what answer choice makes it whole.

Friday - Lesson 06

You’ve got to know grammar for both the ACT and the SAT and this lesson gives you the goods. But it won’t bore you with every grammar rule known (or unknown) to the English-speaking public. We’ll only review the rules that are most commonly tested on the ACT and SAT. And we'll focus on the kinds of errors the tests like to see if you know. Often, those errors are the ones you might be least familiar with. So today, you’ll discover how to spot them and correct them.

Week 4

Wednesday - Lesson 07

It’s not enough to know the rules of grammar. You also need to know how the ACT tests your knowledge, and that’s what this lesson is all about. Today, we'll go over some detailed explanations on how to approach ACT English questions. You'll find out what you need to pay attention to and what you can disregard when you’re examining each of the paragraphs for errors.

Friday - Lesson 08

The SAT has three different multiple-choice question types to test your grammar and English usage skills, and in today's lesson, you'll get a detailed strategy for tackling each one of them. You’ll learn what errors crop up most commonly in the identifying errors questions so you can focus your attention on what’s important. You’ll also find out how you can spot errors in the improving sentences questions just by noticing what types of words are underlined in the questions. You'll also learn which questions are best to skip if you notice that you’re running short of time.

Week 5

Wednesday - Lesson 09

For years, colleges and universities have complained that freshmen don’t know how to write. So now, through the ACT and SAT, they’re going to get a sample of the way potential students write before they even get to college. Writing an essay is a new skill tested on the ACT and SAT. And if the thought of writing a complete analysis of a topic in 30 minutes or less has you running for the hills, don’t despair. In this lesson, you'll learn a specific plan for making the most of your time so you can prove to the admissions committee of your favorite college that you can put your thoughts together in a cohesive and interesting essay.

Friday - Lesson 10

Before you impress the ACT and SAT essay readers, you’ll get a chance to wow your peers. In this lesson, you’ll compose a sample essay and share it with your instructor and classmates for review. You’ll also get the chance to read what other test-takers write and provide them with your enlightened commentary!

Week 6

Wednesday - Lesson 11

The science questions on the ACT involve more reading than calculating, so we'll go over them here in this course to show you how to excel on questions that test your verbal skills. Today you'll learn how to accurately read graphs and charts. You’ll also learn how to extract a bunch of information about experiments without wasting too much precious time reading through the fluff.

Friday - Lesson 12

You'll get a lot of information in six weeks in this course, and you probably won’t remember it all, even with all the additional work you put into each lesson. So in this last lesson, we'll review all of the tips and strategies you’ll need to know to do your best on the verbal questions on the ACT and SAT. In this lesson, we'll make sure you understand the elements of each question type, review what you should focus on, and show you how to best spend your study until you enter the exam site and strut your stuff on test day.

Requirements

The Official SAT Study Guide: For the New SAT, 2nd edition (College Board, 2009), The Real ACT Prep Guide (Peterson's, 2011), Internet access, e-mail, the Microsoft Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox Web browser, and the Adobe Flash and PDF plug-ins (two free and simple downloads you obtain at http://www.adobe.com/downloads by clicking Get Adobe Flash Player and Get Adobe Reader).

Note: The 2004 and 2009 editions of The Official SAT Study Guide are virtually identical in content. If you have a 2004 version of this book, it is acceptable for this course.