English
The English section of the ACT exam consists of 75 multiple choice questions and students have 45 minutes to complete it. The section concentrates on students being able to identify the correct placing of grammatical errors including the usage of commas, apostrophes, modifiers, the colons and fragments and run-ons. It also assesses student’s rhetorical skills and their ability to write and structure sentences.
Mathematics
The students have 60 minutes to complete 60 mathematic questions. There are 14 questions on pre-algebra, 10 questions on elementary algebra, 9 questions on intermediate algebra, 14 questions on plane geometry and 4 elementary trigonometry questions. Calculators are only allowed in this section and this section has five multiple-choice questions as opposed to four.
Reading
The student gets 35 minutes to complete the reading test that consists of four ten-question passages from the realm of prose, humanities, social sciences and natural sciences.
Scientific Reasoning
Students have 35 minutes to complete a 40-question test, which includes seven passages each followed by five to seven questions. There are three data representation passages with five questions each, two research summary packages with 6 questions each and one conflicting viewpoints passage with 7 questions.
Writing
This is an optional section in which students have 30 minutes to respond to a given prompt about a social issue relevant to high school students. It is important that the student does well because if they receive a low score it will lower their score in English. This test is administered at the end of the exam.
The highest composite score a student can achieve is 36 and of the 1,845,787 students who took the ACT’s in 2014, only 1,407 students achieved a composite score of 36.