School

[130moodtrbl]

Please tell me your gpa and everything you do to maintain it like how do you study & organize everything etc. What type of extracurriculars or classes do you take? I'm a junior right now and I could use some tips for next year. Thanks!

[jooyoungsbae]

omg i love your username!!!

im a junior too~~ is it ok if i dm you my stats ??

[VANTE]

i had a 3.95 gpa in high school and now in college i have a 3.6

 

for high school, getting good grades is pretty easy, just do all your homework on time and never skip. for tests, always write things out on paper, it helps you to remember. think of good pneumonic devices to help you remember concepts and stuff.

 

to keep myself organized, i keep a bullet journal. Its really easy to keep stuff organized that way

 

for extracurriculars i did speech and debate, mock trial, choir, and student council

 

hope this helps a little bit!

[130moodtrbl]

omg i love your username!!!

im a junior too~~ is it ok if i dm you my stats ??

yes go ahead!

[130moodtrbl]

i had a 3.95 gpa in high school and now in college i have a 3.6

 

for high school, getting good grades is pretty easy, just do all your homework on time and never skip. for tests, always write things out on paper, it helps you to remember. think of good pneumonic devices to help you remember concepts and stuff.

 

to keep myself organized, i keep a bullet journal. Its really easy to keep stuff organized that way

 

for extracurriculars i did speech and debate, mock trial, choir, and student council

 

hope this helps a little bit!

how did you study for your ap exams and the sat& act? I have 2 ap exams next month and then I'm taking the sat & act in June.

[Dasom's Nose]

hi this might help you: i, ii

[jooyoungsbae]

^ i would use AP prepbooks thats what i did for my AP class last year and it got me a 5!! barrons is good bc their questions are a little more challenging than the test 

for ACT, i honestly took about every practice test out there

the best thing to do is get used to te type of questions they ask, find patterns, learn to manage your time well 

and for each question i got wrong i kept a journal and wrote what i got wrong, why i got it wrong, what tips to use to avoid making the same mistake next time

it helped a lot

[VANTE]

how did you study for your ap exams and the sat& act? I have 2 ap exams next month and then I'm taking the sat & act in June.

ah i have a huge post i wrote up for someone about the act lemme find it

 

 

 

welcome to the moss school of doing well on the act!

 

honestly the biggest study tip i can give is to constantly do practice tests. http://www.fulton-in...ctice_Tests.pdfthis was the book i used (in paper form, but you can do it online too). every time you sit down and study, pick a subject (making sure you give equal amounts of study time to each subject) and then take a practice test from this book. give yourself exactly how much time the actual test does so you get used to the time constraint. i think the hardest thing about the act is the amount of questions you have to answer in a short amount of time, so learn how much time you should approximately give each question and learn to approximately time yourself without needing a stopwatch. 

 

once you take the practice test for the section, go through the answer key and figure out exactly why you got the answer wrong. maybe it was stupid, you misread the question or something. or maybe you forgot some key math concept. the thing that really made me learn was looking at what i got wrong. the trick with the act is that they always ask very similar questions to practice tests and previous tests. you just need to learn to identify what type of question they are asking and how to approach that question. i cannot emphasize enough how important practice tests are.

 

ignore the section where you write an essay for now. it's stupid and pointless and you can literally learn how to do it the night before. focus on the multiple choice right now because some colleges don't even care about the writing section.

 

also! if during the actual test you are really running out of time ALWAYS GUESS. this is so important. never leave even one thing blank on the act cause there's no guessing penalty

 

subject specific things:

 

writing (the grammar part): if i remember correctly this section is mostly where they give you a few sentences on the topic and you have to pick out if there was an error and what the correct version is. for this what i basically did is just try and read the sentence out loud (but not actually out loud if you know what i mean lol) without looking at the choices and see what the natural sentence is. usually your gut is right if you're a native english speaker. of course, there will still be some things you mess up on, and you should figure out if you're missing a lot of questions on one specific grammar point. the questions about the whole package can be kind of tricky though, but still look at what the most logical choice is.

 

math: ugh, math. this was the section i did the worst in otl. get a lot of calculator programs if you have a graphing calculator that can do simple calculations for you, it saves a lot of time. also, learn how to do both straightforward problems and word problems. for word problems, figure out which parts correspond to which variable and then just try to make an equation. make sure you know the basics of trig, because the trig problems are so simple if you've learned the concepts. draw lots of pictures. and if you really have no clue, skip it cause you're on a deadline. no time to waste thinking about it if you didnt learn the concept in school. focus on what you know.

 

reading: my advice on this differs depending on if you are a fast reader or a slow reader. personally, i've always been a fast reader, so i always read the whole passage carefully and then looked at the questions. but a lot of my friends who are slow readers swear by the method of reading the questions first and then finding them in the passage. to tell if you are a slow reader, time yourself taking a practice test where you carefully read each passage. if you run out of time or are close to it, it would just be more efficient to read the questions and find them in the passage. if you don't though, you can afford to read the passage for better comprehension. also, every reading section of the act ever has had four passages: one story, one social sciencey one, one literary/philosophy one, and one natural science one. figure out which type of passage you have the best accuracy on from your practice tests and do those first on the real test. for me, i did humanities -> social science -> fiction  -> natural science. this ensures that you won't run out of time on your best type of passage. 

 

science: the science section really is just scientific reading. this section is notorious for being short in time, so work quickly. again, if you are a slow reader, definitely read the questions first. if you are a fast reader than just read the whole thing for higher accuracy. also, i feel like each experiment goes with each science (like one biology, one physics, one chemistry, one geology). but this really doesn't matter as much because they're not actually questions about the science, just on the data. make sure you know how to interpret graphs, make sure you can interpret tables. OH and the most annoying question is the type where they give two scientist's opinions on a subject. make sure you get those down, because those are such a bitch.

 

and that's about it! it's a lot of work, but it really pays off!

 

and if you guys are practicing and you're not sure why you got one wrong, feel free to pm me or something!

good luck!!!

 

 

 

 

for ap exams it's usually harder to give advice, i would just make sure you know the material front and back. which exams are they?

 

[130moodtrbl]

 

ah i have a huge post i wrote up for someone about the act lemme find it

 

 

 

 

 

welcome to the moss school of doing well on the act!

 

honestly the biggest study tip i can give is to constantly do practice tests. http://www.fulton-in...ctice_Tests.pdfthis was the book i used (in paper form, but you can do it online too). every time you sit down and study, pick a subject (making sure you give equal amounts of study time to each subject) and then take a practice test from this book. give yourself exactly how much time the actual test does so you get used to the time constraint. i think the hardest thing about the act is the amount of questions you have to answer in a short amount of time, so learn how much time you should approximately give each question and learn to approximately time yourself without needing a stopwatch.

 

once you take the practice test for the section, go through the answer key and figure out exactly why you got the answer wrong. maybe it was stupid, you misread the question or something. or maybe you forgot some key math concept. the thing that really made me learn was looking at what i got wrong. the trick with the act is that they always ask very similar questions to practice tests and previous tests. you just need to learn to identify what type of question they are asking and how to approach that question. i cannot emphasize enough how important practice tests are.

 

ignore the section where you write an essay for now. it's stupid and pointless and you can literally learn how to do it the night before. focus on the multiple choice right now because some colleges don't even care about the writing section.

 

also! if during the actual test you are really running out of time ALWAYS GUESS. this is so important. never leave even one thing blank on the act cause there's no guessing penalty

 

subject specific things:

 

writing (the grammar part): if i remember correctly this section is mostly where they give you a few sentences on the topic and you have to pick out if there was an error and what the correct version is. for this what i basically did is just try and read the sentence out loud (but not actually out loud if you know what i mean lol) without looking at the choices and see what the natural sentence is. usually your gut is right if you're a native english speaker. of course, there will still be some things you mess up on, and you should figure out if you're missing a lot of questions on one specific grammar point. the questions about the whole package can be kind of tricky though, but still look at what the most logical choice is.

 

math: ugh, math. this was the section i did the worst in otl. get a lot of calculator programs if you have a graphing calculator that can do simple calculations for you, it saves a lot of time. also, learn how to do both straightforward problems and word problems. for word problems, figure out which parts correspond to which variable and then just try to make an equation. make sure you know the basics of trig, because the trig problems are so simple if you've learned the concepts. draw lots of pictures. and if you really have no clue, skip it cause you're on a deadline. no time to waste thinking about it if you didnt learn the concept in school. focus on what you know.

 

reading: my advice on this differs depending on if you are a fast reader or a slow reader. personally, i've always been a fast reader, so i always read the whole passage carefully and then looked at the questions. but a lot of my friends who are slow readers swear by the method of reading the questions first and then finding them in the passage. to tell if you are a slow reader, time yourself taking a practice test where you carefully read each passage. if you run out of time or are close to it, it would just be more efficient to read the questions and find them in the passage. if you don't though, you can afford to read the passage for better comprehension. also, every reading section of the act ever has had four passages: one story, one social sciencey one, one literary/philosophy one, and one natural science one. figure out which type of passage you have the best accuracy on from your practice tests and do those first on the real test. for me, i did humanities -> social science -> fiction -> natural science. this ensures that you won't run out of time on your best type of passage.

 

science: the science section really is just scientific reading. this section is notorious for being short in time, so work quickly. again, if you are a slow reader, definitely read the questions first. if you are a fast reader than just read the whole thing for higher accuracy. also, i feel like each experiment goes with each science (like one biology, one physics, one chemistry, one geology). but this really doesn't matter as much because they're not actually questions about the science, just on the data. make sure you know how to interpret graphs, make sure you can interpret tables. OH and the most annoying question is the type where they give two scientist's opinions on a subject. make sure you get those down, because those are such a bitch.

 

and that's about it! it's a lot of work, but it really pays off!

 

and if you guys are practicing and you're not sure why you got one wrong, feel free to pm me or something!

good luck!!!

 

 

 

 

 

for ap exams it's usually harder to give advice, i would just make sure you know the material front and back. which exams are they?

 

english language and us history

[VANTE]

english language and us history

ah, i didn't take english language, so i can't help you on that one

 

for us history, make sure you know the dates of the important stuff, know chronological order and things like that, it's important for the multiple choice. for the essays, take a little time to write out your three points on scratch paper. for each essay you'll need like around three paragraphs to get a good score. so if the question is like "discuss the south's reaction to reconstruction" you could do like, political reaction, economic reaction, and social (everyday lives of people) reaction. or something like that

 

dbq's are basically the same thing as the other essays, i actually think they're easier because you can group the documents into three points and then just discuss. make sure you cite the documents too, like in parenthetical form. so like say "this letter written to john adams shows how he important he was as ambassador to the uk (document d)." 

 

i think a good method of paragraphs for the essays is explain and signify. so for each document you wanna use, explain what it is, its context, etc and then explain why it is overall significant to us history or to the point you're making

 

sorry i can't be more helpful, it's been like 3 years since i took ap us lol

[Nowhere Boy]

I'm a junior in high school with a 3.2gpa. To tell you the truth, I don't have a fucking clue how I maintain it. I never study, I stay up really late most nights.. I just do all of my work, that's really it. I pay attention in class also.