Certificate in SAT/ACT Preparation - Part 1 Online Course

Know Yourself; Know the Tests

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.

Master the Reading Questions

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.

Practice on the ACT Reading Questions

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.

Practice on the SAT Reading Questions

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.

Master the SAT Sentence-Completion Questions

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.

Learn the Grammar You Need for the SAT and ACT

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.

Learn How to Ace the ACT English Usage Section

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.

Thrive on the SAT English Questions

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.

Prepare the Student-Written Essay

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.

Practice for the Student-Written Essay

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!

Excel on the ACT Science Test

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.

Wrap Up the Course

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.