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Pacing & Guessing Strategies for Science
Transcript
Welcome to Pacing and Guessing Strategies for the Science Section. So I'm gonna tell you just a couple pacing strategies and how to work with the clock a little bit. The first strategy, and you're gonna see this with pretty much any source you consult and it's true. That's why everyone says it, is that it's best to save the conflicting viewpoints passages for last.
And I'll show you what that looks like. Usually, for the scientific passages you see a bunch of graphs, charts, tables and some text. For the conflicting viewpoints passages, you're seeing almost all text. And sometimes it is just text, like this one. So that's one way you can identify.
But the giveaway is this, we've got scientist 1 and scientist 2 ,could be hypothesis 1, hypothesis 2, theory 1, theory 2, you get the idea. That's kinda the giveaway. What we know is that these take longer to answer. It's always better to do these last. You wanna get as many points as you can that are quick, and then save the time consuming questions for last.
So do this last. Some timing guideline strategies I have. One recommendation is to use two timers at a time and this is really the only section where I recommend this. You can do it for others too, but I actually think it is helpful for this section for most students.
One timer you want to budget at the level of the passage. I recommend 5 minutes per passage and if you have a total of 6 passages that's gonna get you to the point that after the fifth passage you'll have used 25 minutes, you'll have 10 minutes left. With those last ten minutes, you can do the conflicting viewpoints passages or passage with the two different perspectives.
And then also, you have time to go back and answer anything that you might have to skip over. Because if you look at it from the level of the question, which what you're gonna be using your other timer for, I recommend trying for about 50 seconds per questions. You actually have 52, 53 seconds per questions. But if you aim for 50 that's just gonna give you a little bit a margin.
Aim for 50, but don't let yourself go over 75. If you don't quite get it in 50, just give it a little bit of a go still, if you get to 75 seconds just skip and come back. You can come back at the end of that passage. If you still have some of your five minutes left, or if you don't have any time left for that passage, you can come back at the very end of the exam.
Now, what if you have seven passages? You're probably gonna have six passages, but if you have seven passages what you might want to do is just bring this down a little bit. It's a really good idea to go through and count first. Just look and see how many you have. They are numbered with Roman numerals, so you don't have to go through and count them manually.
And if you get a test like that, maybe just a little bit under five minutes per passage. Now, last to appear, I just wanna point out, is that during the actual exam, I don't want you to be a clock hawk. I want you to use your clocks and stop watches and whatnot while you are doing your actual studying and practicing.
But then when you go into the exam, hopefully at that point you already have kind of an intrinsic sense of what does 50 seconds feel like? What does 75 seconds feel like? And you can just pay attention to this, just pay attention to the amount of time per passage which is gonna be around five minutes or maybe a little bit less. And also keep in mind that on the actual exam, you can't have anything that beeps.
A lot of students just bring in actual watches, like old fashioned watches or maybe stop watches that have their timer feature turned off. Guessing strategies. If you've watched any of my other pacing videos, you know that I will emphasize over and over again. The best strategy is always to eliminate wrong answers and then use intuition, guesses, answers to select an answer among whatever remains.
However, if you find yourself in a situation where you're out of time and you're needing to guess randomly, there are a couple of little techniques you might use just to increase your odds a little bit, from one in four, to maybe one in three, or one three and a half. These are just little statistical games, these are not meant to be primary strategies, these are guessing strategies.
First is choose the what I call the way too obvious option. So let's look at that. So we see, according to study 3, and we're gonna be going fast because that's the reason we have to use some guessing strategies. Compared with corresponding AR for small plumes, we've got large plumes that have an average AR at a given wavelength that is, is it always higher, always the same, always lower, or sometimes higher, sometimes lower?
Well, it looks like kinda like a sixth grade graph that you might interpret, always higher. Just go with the one that seems too obvious. Because more times than you might realize, at least a few times on the exam, there are these kind of like almost too obvious, they almost trip you up because they're so straightforward, that's one guessing strategy.
The second guessing strategy, and this is one that I kinda came to realize on my own from looking at past exams and doing some statistical calculations. It's kinda nerdy, but I did put this into computer programs. That in past exams, when the correct answer to these what are called increase-decrease questions, were usually either increase or decrease. And if that means nothing to you, let's look at the example.
You'll probably see two to four questions that look something like this. You might even get as many as five or six. It's a very common format. So we have something like, in some study as time increased from 0 to 6, some other measurement that we don't really want to pronounce or even think about, what was it doing during that time that the 0 to 6 was increasing?
Was this other measurement decreasing only? Was it increasing only? Did it decrease then increase? Did it increase then decrease? And you might also see options like remained constant or no discernible pattern or increase, then plateaued.
So there are a lot of different possibilities especially for these last two, but there are almost always these options. Decreased only, increased only. And what I found is that between 60 and 80% of the time, the correct answer was 1 of these 2. There wasn't any statistical difference between these two, between decreased and increased.
But if you get a question like this, and you have to randomly guess, I would say guess either the decrease or the increase. So, again, the way to really improve your score is not to master these little statistical games, because they're not gonna give you much of an advantage. They're mostly just gonna calm you down and give you a guessing strategy. The way to improve is to watch the lessons, practice a lot, especially for this section, and then review some of the flashcards.
People just always say, I see this all the time in blog posts and stuff like, you don't need to know science to do the ACT. Well, that's kinda true. But what I found is that if you do know the science, if you know about cell reproduction or how to balance equations, things like this, you really do have an advantage.
And it's something that, the concepts aren't that hard, they're pretty quick to learn, and it's really nice for you because we've already made the flashcards. So you don't even have to take the time to think about, well, do I study, or what don't I? So check out the flashcards, watch the other lessons. I'm really proud of you for sticking with this, I know it takes discipline, I know it's boring a lot of times.
But hopefully, it can be kind of like a game, you can kind of race yourself in trying to improve your score. And it is gonna pay off. With practice, I improved, other students improve. Wherever you are right now, keep practicing. It's gonna pay off.
Read full transcriptAnd I'll show you what that looks like. Usually, for the scientific passages you see a bunch of graphs, charts, tables and some text. For the conflicting viewpoints passages, you're seeing almost all text. And sometimes it is just text, like this one. So that's one way you can identify.
But the giveaway is this, we've got scientist 1 and scientist 2 ,could be hypothesis 1, hypothesis 2, theory 1, theory 2, you get the idea. That's kinda the giveaway. What we know is that these take longer to answer. It's always better to do these last. You wanna get as many points as you can that are quick, and then save the time consuming questions for last.
So do this last. Some timing guideline strategies I have. One recommendation is to use two timers at a time and this is really the only section where I recommend this. You can do it for others too, but I actually think it is helpful for this section for most students.
One timer you want to budget at the level of the passage. I recommend 5 minutes per passage and if you have a total of 6 passages that's gonna get you to the point that after the fifth passage you'll have used 25 minutes, you'll have 10 minutes left. With those last ten minutes, you can do the conflicting viewpoints passages or passage with the two different perspectives.
And then also, you have time to go back and answer anything that you might have to skip over. Because if you look at it from the level of the question, which what you're gonna be using your other timer for, I recommend trying for about 50 seconds per questions. You actually have 52, 53 seconds per questions. But if you aim for 50 that's just gonna give you a little bit a margin.
Aim for 50, but don't let yourself go over 75. If you don't quite get it in 50, just give it a little bit of a go still, if you get to 75 seconds just skip and come back. You can come back at the end of that passage. If you still have some of your five minutes left, or if you don't have any time left for that passage, you can come back at the very end of the exam.
Now, what if you have seven passages? You're probably gonna have six passages, but if you have seven passages what you might want to do is just bring this down a little bit. It's a really good idea to go through and count first. Just look and see how many you have. They are numbered with Roman numerals, so you don't have to go through and count them manually.
And if you get a test like that, maybe just a little bit under five minutes per passage. Now, last to appear, I just wanna point out, is that during the actual exam, I don't want you to be a clock hawk. I want you to use your clocks and stop watches and whatnot while you are doing your actual studying and practicing.
But then when you go into the exam, hopefully at that point you already have kind of an intrinsic sense of what does 50 seconds feel like? What does 75 seconds feel like? And you can just pay attention to this, just pay attention to the amount of time per passage which is gonna be around five minutes or maybe a little bit less. And also keep in mind that on the actual exam, you can't have anything that beeps.
A lot of students just bring in actual watches, like old fashioned watches or maybe stop watches that have their timer feature turned off. Guessing strategies. If you've watched any of my other pacing videos, you know that I will emphasize over and over again. The best strategy is always to eliminate wrong answers and then use intuition, guesses, answers to select an answer among whatever remains.
However, if you find yourself in a situation where you're out of time and you're needing to guess randomly, there are a couple of little techniques you might use just to increase your odds a little bit, from one in four, to maybe one in three, or one three and a half. These are just little statistical games, these are not meant to be primary strategies, these are guessing strategies.
First is choose the what I call the way too obvious option. So let's look at that. So we see, according to study 3, and we're gonna be going fast because that's the reason we have to use some guessing strategies. Compared with corresponding AR for small plumes, we've got large plumes that have an average AR at a given wavelength that is, is it always higher, always the same, always lower, or sometimes higher, sometimes lower?
Well, it looks like kinda like a sixth grade graph that you might interpret, always higher. Just go with the one that seems too obvious. Because more times than you might realize, at least a few times on the exam, there are these kind of like almost too obvious, they almost trip you up because they're so straightforward, that's one guessing strategy.
The second guessing strategy, and this is one that I kinda came to realize on my own from looking at past exams and doing some statistical calculations. It's kinda nerdy, but I did put this into computer programs. That in past exams, when the correct answer to these what are called increase-decrease questions, were usually either increase or decrease. And if that means nothing to you, let's look at the example.
You'll probably see two to four questions that look something like this. You might even get as many as five or six. It's a very common format. So we have something like, in some study as time increased from 0 to 6, some other measurement that we don't really want to pronounce or even think about, what was it doing during that time that the 0 to 6 was increasing?
Was this other measurement decreasing only? Was it increasing only? Did it decrease then increase? Did it increase then decrease? And you might also see options like remained constant or no discernible pattern or increase, then plateaued.
So there are a lot of different possibilities especially for these last two, but there are almost always these options. Decreased only, increased only. And what I found is that between 60 and 80% of the time, the correct answer was 1 of these 2. There wasn't any statistical difference between these two, between decreased and increased.
But if you get a question like this, and you have to randomly guess, I would say guess either the decrease or the increase. So, again, the way to really improve your score is not to master these little statistical games, because they're not gonna give you much of an advantage. They're mostly just gonna calm you down and give you a guessing strategy. The way to improve is to watch the lessons, practice a lot, especially for this section, and then review some of the flashcards.
People just always say, I see this all the time in blog posts and stuff like, you don't need to know science to do the ACT. Well, that's kinda true. But what I found is that if you do know the science, if you know about cell reproduction or how to balance equations, things like this, you really do have an advantage.
And it's something that, the concepts aren't that hard, they're pretty quick to learn, and it's really nice for you because we've already made the flashcards. So you don't even have to take the time to think about, well, do I study, or what don't I? So check out the flashcards, watch the other lessons. I'm really proud of you for sticking with this, I know it takes discipline, I know it's boring a lot of times.
But hopefully, it can be kind of like a game, you can kind of race yourself in trying to improve your score. And it is gonna pay off. With practice, I improved, other students improve. Wherever you are right now, keep practicing. It's gonna pay off.
