ACT Practice Tests What They Can and Cant Do

ACT Practice Tests What They Can and Can't Do SAT / ACT Prep Online Guides and Tips ACT practice tests are invaluable for any level of ACT preparation, from those just beginning their study to those who have studied for months already. There are limits, however, to what ACT practice tests can do. Read on to find out what things ACT practice tests are good for and what they just can’t accomplish. feature image credit: Limited/used under CC BY 2.0/Cropped and resized from original. What ACT Practice Tests Do Well Going through ACT practice tests can help your studying in myriad ways. For one thing, taking practice ACTs orients you towards the test. If you get too caught up in doing practice problem sets, you can forget what your ultimate goal is: doing well on the ACT when you sit down and take it on test day, not just acing problems in isolation. Making it through the full test length (between three and four hours, depending on whether or not you take ACT Plus Writing) requires stamina as well as knowledge, and part of being prepared is making sure that you’re strong in both those arenas. At the very beginning of your studying, you should sit down and take a realistic ACT practice test all the way through. The realistic part is important because by taking practice tests in the morning and all at once (just like the real ACT), you’ll be able to review mistakes that wouldn’t show up if you were just doing practice sets in the afternoon or evening. Practice tests are valuable not just because of what you gain while you’re taking them, but because of what you can gain upon reflection after taking the test. After you've taken your first practice test, note what surprised you most about the experience (both in a good way and in a bad way). It could turn out that you're a lot more focused when you sit down to take the test all at once; on the other hand, you might discover that when you take the ACT at 8am, you're a lot more prone to making careless mistakes on Reading than you would be otherwise. Reviewing wrong answers, or even questions you weren't sure about but guessed correctly on, is key to improvement. Once you identify your problems, you can then come up with solutions (whether it’s making sure to sleep enough the night before the test or continuing to take more practice tests to get used to the time demands). After you've implemented those solutions, you should take a second practice test and see if the changes you've made in your studying have resulted in changes in your score. One final point is that taking practice tests close (but not too close) to the ACT helps you build up your test muscle memory. Like playing a piano concerto all the way through in advance of a concert, or playing through a full-time scrimmage before a big game, taking full-length ACT practice tests gets your mind in shape. Overall, practice tests are a critical (30%+) part of a good ACT study program. It’s imperative that you have high accuracy questions that are representative of what you'll see on test day, and there's no better source of these high-quality questions than official ACT practice tests. Read more about why high-quality materials are important in our guide to the best ACT prep websites out there. What ACT Practice Tests Don’t Do While practice tests are important for all the reasons outlined above, you can't spend 80%+ of your ACT prep time on practice tests and call it a day, because practice tests aren’t the answer to every problem and won’t cure all your issues. For example, if you're 30 hours into your studying, you shouldn't take three practice tests in a row and expect to see positive results. You'll be gaining a little bit of muscle memory, but score increases as a result of muscle memory are very low. You'd be better off investing that time shoring up your weak spots with targeted practice questions. Focused practice outside of taking full-length practice tests is important for improving specific skills, like using quadratic equations or understanding parallelisms. Doing the same type of question over and over again and drilling down on why you're making mistakes is the most effective path to improving your performance in those areas. Seeking Lavender (Provence 2012)/used under CC BY-SA 2.0/Resized from original. As you improve on the ACT overall, doing this kind of narrow practice is more efficient, because the more you study, the fewer areas and types of questions you’ll struggle with. Thus, it’s a better use of your time to focus in on your weak areas rather than taking an entire practice test and wasting time on doing questions that you already can ace. Practice tests also become useless or wasted without enough preparation before taking each one. If you take one, don’t learn any lessons (either by reflecting on wrong answers or reviewing theory and content you didn't know), and take another practice test, the second one will almost certainly be a waste of time and energy. What’s Next? Want to make sure you're mimicking the real test when you take practice tests? Learn about the eight steps to follow to get the most realistic ACT practice test experience here. Have a limited amount of time to study and want to make sure you divide it up wisely? Read our guide to using ACT practice tests over 20 hours of prep. How can you study your way to a perfect ACT score? PrepScholar co-founder and perfect scorer Allen Cheng walks you through his process in his article on how to get a perfect 36 on the ACT. Want to improve your ACT score by 4 points? Check out our best-in-class online ACT prep program. We guarantee your money back if you don't improve your ACT score by 4 points or more. Our program is entirely online, and it customizes your prep program to your strengths and weaknesses. We also have expert instructors who can grade every one of your practice ACT essays, giving feedback on how to improve your score. Check out our 5-day free trial:

Argos Was an Important Greek Polis

Argos Was an Important Greek Polis Located by the Gulf of Argolis, Argos is an important polis of Greece in the southern section, the Peloponnese, specifically, in the area called the Argolid. It has been inhabited since prehistoric times. The inhabitants were known as á ¼Ë†Ã ÃŽ ³ÃŽ µÃ¡ ¿â€"ÃŽ ¿ÃŽ ¹ (Argives), a term that is sometimes used for all the Greeks. Argos competed with Sparta for prominence in the Peloponnese but lost. The Gods and Heros of Argos Argos was named for an eponymous hero. The more familiar Greek heroes Perseus and Bellerophon are also connected with the city. In the Dorian invasion, when the descendants of Heracles, known as the Heraclidae, invaded the Peloponnese, Temenus received Argos for his lot. Temenos is one of the ancestors of the Macedonian royal house from which came Alexander the Great. Argives worshiped the goddess Hera in particular. They honored her with an Heraion and annual festival. There were also sanctuaries of Apollo Pythaeus, Athena Oxyderces, Athena Polias, and Zeus Larissaeus (located on the Argive acropolis known as Larissa). The Nemean Games were held in Argos from the end of the fifth century to the late fourth because the sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea had been destroyed; then, in 271, Argos became their permanent home. Telesilla of Argos was a female Greek poet who wrote around the turn of the fifth century B.C.  She is best known for rallying the women of Argos against the attacking Spartans under Cleomenes I, in about 494. Alternate Spellings: á ¼Å'Ï ÃŽ ³ÃŽ ¿Ãâ€š Argos in Literature In the period of the Trojan War, Diomedes ruled Argos, but Agamemnon was his overlord, and so the whole Peloponnese is sometimes referred to as Argos. The Iliad Book VI mentions Argos in connection with mythological figures Sisyphus and Bellerophon: There is a city in the heart of Argos, pasture land of horses, called Ephyra, where Sisyphus lived, who was the craftiest of all mankind. He was the son of Aeolus, and had a son named Glaucus, who was father to Bellerophon, whom heaven endowed with the most surpassing comeliness and beauty. But Proetus devised his ruin, and being stronger than he, drove him from the land of the Argives, over which Jove had made him ruler. Some Apollodorus references to Argos: 2.1 Ocean and Tethys had a son Inachus, after whom a river in Argos is called Inachus....But Argus received the kingdom and called the Peloponnese after himself Argos; and having married Evadne, daughter of Strymon and Neaera, he begat Ecbasus, Piras, Epidaurus, and Criasus, who also succeeded to the kingdom. Ecbasus had a son Agenor, and Agenor had a son Argus, the one who is called the All-seeing. He had eyes in the whole of his body, and being exceedingly strong he killed the bull that ravaged Arcadia and clad himself in its hide; and when a satyr wronged the Arcadians and robbed them of their cattle, Argus withstood and killed him.Thence [Danaus] came to Argos and the reigning king Gelanor surrendered the kingdom to him; and having made himself master of the country he named the inhabitants Danai after himself. 2.2 Lynceus reigned over Argos after Danaus and begat a son Abas by Hypermnestra; and Abas had twin sons Acrisius and Proetus by Aglaia, daughter of Mantineus.... They divided the whole of the Argive territory between them and settled in it, Acrisius reigning over Argos and Proetus over Tiryns. Sources Argos The Concise Oxford Companion to Classical Literature. Ed. M.C. Howatson and Ian Chilvers. Oxford University Press, 1996. Albert Schachter Argos, Cults The Oxford Classical Dictionary. Ed. Simon Hornblower and Anthony Spawforth. Oxford University Press 2009. The Traditional Enmity Between Sparta and Argos: The Birth and Development of a MythThomas KellyThe American Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 4 (Apr., 1970), pp. 971-1003 Reviving Nemeas Games