In planning your ACT prep, you probably want to know how long you need to study. Is it weeks or months? Is it dozens of hours or hundreds?
The answer to these questions depends on a variety of factors, including your target score and how comfortable you already are with the test material. There’s no reason to torture yourself with endless studying if your scores are already in the right range for your top choice schools. On the other hand, if you're still pretty far away from the scores you want, you may have to work harder than you think.
In this guide, I'll show you how to figure out how much you need to improve, how many hours you need to spend to get there, and how you should build a study schedule before your next real ACT.
Your ACT target score is the score you're aiming for that'll be high enough to get you into your top schools. You can download this free guide to calculate your target ACT score. You can also check out this article for a quick look at how to find an appropriate target score for your goals.
The easiest way to determine a target score is to Google your top choice school and “ACT scores.” You should be able to find a 25th percentile score and a 75th percentile score for the school. The range between the two represents the scores of the middle 50 percent of admitted students.
Aim for the 75th percentile score (a higher score than 75 percent of the school’s admitted students) as your target to make sure you have the best chances of acceptance!
Here's a link to five free printable ACT practice tests, complete with answer keys so you can grade them yourself. Take one of these practice tests so you can see where you are relative to your target score. When I say to take a practice test, I don't mean answer questions for a section casually throughout the day while watching YouTube videos in the background. Really force yourself to live the experience of the ACT as it is in the actual test environment. Set aside a weekend morning and go through each section with the same constraints you would have on the real test.
Why should you subject yourself to such torment? Because it's the only way to get a good estimate of where you stand in relation to your target score. Time pressure is a huge factor on the ACT, and it can impact your score significantly. Furthermore, going through all the sections in a row forces you to account for any fatigue you might experience on the later sections of the test.
If you already know your starting point scores from a previous test or practice test, great! As soon as you settle on your test date, you'll be ready to cook up a study plan.
A bitter Salvador Dali painted this to try and convince himself that time was a meaningless construct after he ran out of it on the ACT.
We recommend taking the ACT for the first time during your junior fall in our Complete Study Plan. That way you'll be able to retake the test in the spring if necessary, and you'll be free to devote your senior year to college apps and devising elaborate senior pranks.
If you're already coming up on senior fall and have to take the ACT in September or October no matter what, that’s OK too. Either way, you can find a study plan that works for you.
Here is a rough guide to how many hours of study time you should put in for a given point improvement:
