The holidays are here! Time for some well-deserved rest and family time for our hardworking students.
However, we don’t want students to totally disengage from test prep over break. When they get back to school in January, it will be a sprint toward end-of-semester finals and other demonstrations of learning. Before kids know it, the February and March* ACTs are upon them. So here are a few ways students can keep their test prep momentum going over the next few weeks.
*Our regular reminder that the March test is for students in public schools (and some private schools) in Wisconsin.
How your student can use winter break to prep:
Take a practice test!
Students tend to do better on exams when they have fewer external stresses. We’re offering our usual Sunday practice tests on December 22 (Madison and Milwaukee) and 29 (Madison), and we added a practice ACT on Monday, December 23. You can see available dates and register at galined.com/events.
Find a time for your child to meet with their test prep tutor.
Taking a week off here and there is fine, but we want to avoid two weeks without test prep. Even if a student is out of town, they can do a virtual session using our online lesson space – meetings don’t necessarily have to take place in person if scheduling is challenging.
Do practice problems and even full sections.
For example, students can restrict their timing to mimic the ACT’s – 45 minutes here (for English), 35 minutes there (for Reading or Science) – so it need not be a huge time commitment. For students preparing for the SAT, timing practice is more difficult since the test is adaptive (and there aren’t many practice exams available), but we have plenty of practice problems and resources that their tutor can assign.
Read for fun!
This is the same advice we always give to students over the summer; any kind of reading (books, articles, fiction, nonfiction, etc.) helps. Check out our winter reading recs here!
A couple of other notes for students who took the December 14 ACT:
Based on the typical 10-day score release timeline, it appears that score reports may start coming out on Christmas Eve. Of course, it’s natural for students to be anxious and curious about their scores, but a lower-than-expected result could cast a shadow on holiday festivities. As tempting as it may be, we’d advise waiting a few days to look at scores.
The December exam is one of the three national test dates for which the ACT releases the test booklet, called a Test Information Release (TIR). We highly recommend that students who took the December test purchase a TIR, if they didn’t already sign up for it as part of their registration. TIRs are particularly useful for tutors and students to review together, as they allow us to see the exact items students missed and the concepts that the most recent ACT tests. TIRs are provided as PDFs a couple of weeks after scores come out.
Finally, if your child is a junior, and you have considered signing up for test prep but haven’t yet done so, it’s not too late! Students can test into the fall of their senior year for both the SAT and ACT; note that the ACT has some important changes coming in 2025.
Warm wishes from Galin Ed on a happy holiday season! See you in the New Year.
