Friday, June 13, 2014

Study materials review: Up Your Score ACT

Up Your Score for the SAT was originally introduced in the 1980's.  It is periodically updated by a fresh crop of perfect scorers.  (You can read my review of that book here.) This is the first ACT version.  It was put together by a test prep tutor (Chris Arp) and 3 perfect-scoring students who are now in college.  Like the SAT version, the book is cute and clever.  Also like the SAT version you have to wade through an awful lot of cute and clever to get to the actual meat of the advice.  As you may have gleaned from my previous reviews, I like the books that offer targeted practice.  This one does not.  It was not written as a stand-alone resource; you'd have to buy a guide with actual practice tests as well.  As of this writing (June 2014) the price isn't bad - about $14.  Still, there's no reason not to just check a copy out of the library.

There is some fairly interesting study advice that will apply to subjects other than the ACT, and, as I mentioned in a previous post, the section on punctuation is particularly useful.  If you really need to own your own copy, there is a link below.