If you're in administration or you're a classroom teacher, a big problem happening is that what do you do with students whenever they're not hitting benchmark on their ACT? Well, what I want to share with you today, we've got a tool we use in the classroom here at TorchPrep to help students hit benchmark on the ACT. So I'll share it with you real quick. It's a practical tool that you can use in the classroom with your students so they can get closer to hitting benchmark on this test. And what we call this, it's simply Redefining the Win.

Students don't know what a win is on the ACT. In class, it's simple. Take a test, try to score as high as you can, maybe get an A and you're happy. But what is an A on the ACT? So what we want to show students is that an A on the ACT test is hitting benchmark.

So let's take English, for example. What would be an A on the English test for students? Well, getting an A is hitting benchmark and what is benchmark? The national ACT benchmark for the English test is an 18. And that is roughly a 50%. Which is crazy. Scoring an 18 on the English test means you get 50% of the questions right. So an "A" in class is 90 to 100 or so. But on the ACT, an A is 50%.

So let's just look. If you have a book like this ("The Real ACT Prep Guide"), you can go to the scale score section and see what an 18 is in terms of questions right. Number of questions right. So you turn there, you can look and see that getting an 18 on the English test is getting roughly 37 questions correct. And again, this is a 50%. So what's really neat is you can show students that they're sitting at a 16 on the ACT English section, then they're getting roughly 34 questions right. You can say, "Okay, to go from a 16 to an 18, to go from not college ready to college ready, you need to get three questions right." And this is so encouraging for students because no longer are you saying to a student, "Go out there and do well on the ACT." You're now saying, "Go out there and get three more English questions right."

So in the end, what is so cool about this strategy of defining a win is that in class, getting a 50% is a failure, but on the ACT test, a 50%, that's college.

Resources:

The Real ACT Prep Guide - http://www.act.org/content/act/en/products-and-services/the-act/test-preparation/the-official-guide.html

Make sure to check out the rest of our post to find even more ways to beat the ACT and reach your goals in the pursuit of college.