Time management | ACT math intro | ACT Math

Time management is one of the most crucial skills for standardized tests. These tests are a time crunch, even for the most gifted students, so it’s important to understand how to get the most value from your time, and when it’s appropriate to take shortcuts.

To get the most from this section, be honest with yourself when deciding which categories apply. These tips are certainly worth practicing, but not all will apply to everyone! We’re giving you the tools to build your own personalized toolkit for a time management plan.

Problem-solving procedures

To solve a problem quickly and most effectively, you should follow a general series of steps—first looking for quick wins, and then digging deeper into the details. The goal is to find the answer as soon as possible, but naturally, some questions require more effort than others. If you don’t know the answer after the first step, you move on to the second step, and then the third, and so on.

Keep these steps in mind as you solve each problem to make sure that you don’t make any small mistakes:

Read and annotate the question
Ask yourself what the question wants you to find
Look to the answers to see what your choices are
Cross out choices to narrow down the options
Make your best-educated guess and move on

It’s important to be able to admit when you don’t understand a question, but you don’t want to give up too quickly either and leave points on the table. If you go through this process and still can’t find the answer by the end, you can make a guess, knowing you’ve made your best effort.

Annotating word problems

Word problems make up a very large portion of the problems on any ACT math test, and learning strategies to solve word problems more quickly will save a lot of time on the test overall. This is such an important topic that we’ve dedicated a whole section to it—Understanding word problems. We’ll get to this in a moment.

Tips for those confident with most ACT math topics

Work quickly through the easier portions of the test (questions 1–40) so that you have more time to solve the difficult questions (questions 41–60).

You’ll come across some more difficult questions in the earlier portions of the test, and spending a bit more time on some is fine. However, don’t fall into the trap of using up all the time you earned from answering the previous questions more quickly! You’ll need that time on the final 20 hard questions. If you feel yourself getting stuck on a question, just make your best guess and flag it so you can revisit it at the end.

You get 60 minutes to answer 60 questions, so you should aim to…

spend 30 seconds or less on easy questions (1–20)
spend about a minute on medium questions (21–40)
spend about a minute and a half on hard questions (41–60).

Thirty seconds go by fast. If you get stuck, you might accidentally end up spending two or three minutes on an “easy” question… Oops, now that’s two other “hard” questions you should’ve answered but didn’t have time for.

So, stick to the process, and go slowly yet steadily. You basically get one good chance to answer each question, so you need to give it your best shot but keep it sandboxed.

Tips for those not as confident with most ACT math topics

Spend more time on the earlier portions of the test (questions 1–40) to have the best shot at getting as many of those questions right as possible. You should make it an absolute priority to solve questions 1–40 to the best of your ability. It’s completely okay if you don’t even get to questions 41 onward.

Sidenote

All ACT questions are created equal (but not really)

Like most standardized tests, the ACT math section scales its scores.

You’re answering 60 questions, but you get a scaled score out of 36. And in a way, the scores are scaled again, since you probably shouldn’t be trying to get a perfect score; really, you should be aiming to get a little bit higher than the average score for the school you want to attend.

The average scaled ACT math score is about 20. This may seem obvious, but to be clear: about half of ACT math test takers score 20 or under. So, if you score 20+, you’ve beaten half the competition. That’s good.

To get a scaled score of 20, you only need to answer about 30 questions correctly. ACT math answers each count equally—you don’t get more points for answering the harder questions.

So, if you’re not great at math, focus your time and energy on locking in those points for the easy and medium questions.

After you’ve confidently answered the first 40 questions, consider any extra time as a bonus. Skim through the final 20 questions to find ones that seem easier, and maybe you’ll pick up another point or two.

And, of course, make sure to guess on every question. You aren’t penalized for incorrect choices. Even with completely random guesses on the last 20 questions, you’re likely to get an extra four points with lucky guesses!