ACT Reading & Science Strategy: How to Stop Rushing and Raise Your Score
The PrepLion Team
Tutors & test-prep writers · Reviewed for accuracy
If English feels fine but Reading and Science are the sections that wobble, you are in very good company — they're the two most students find hardest to pin down, and the advice online contradicts itself. Read the passage first! No, read the questions first! Skim! Don't skim! It's confusing because the honest answer is: the right method is different for each of these two sections, and it also depends on the one thing most guides ignore — whether you tend to rush.
So let's start there, because it's the highest-leverage fix.
If you rush, slowing down usually raises your score
Here's the counterintuitive truth: on Reading and Science, most students who score below their potential aren't losing points because they ran out of time. They're losing points because they moved too fast — grabbed the answer that "looked right," misread a line, or skipped the detail the question hinged on. Rushing feels productive and quietly costs you more points than it saves.
If you're a slower reader with a tendency to rush, those two traits fight each other, and rushing usually wins in a bad way: you speed up to compensate for being slow, and accuracy collapses. The fix is not to read faster. It's to read once, carefully, so you don't have to go back — and to trust that a careful first pass is faster than a panicked second one. Accuracy before speed. Get the method solid and untimed first; add the clock later.
Reading: engage the passage, and annotate so you don't have to remember
For the Reading section, the "read the whole passage first" camp is mostly right — especially if you have a weaker memory. Here's why: if you jump straight to the questions and hunt, you end up reading most of the passage anyway, just in a frantic, out-of-order way that's worse for comprehension. A calm first read builds the mental map that makes every question faster.
But "read it" doesn't mean read it passively and hope it sticks. It means annotate as you go — and this is the single best tip for anyone with a "bad memory." Your memory isn't the problem; relying on it is. Mark the passage instead:
- Underline the main idea of each paragraph in a few words.
- Circle names, dates, and shifts in opinion ("however," "but," "in contrast").
- Jot a two-word summary in the margin at each paragraph break.
Now the passage itself is your memory. When a question asks about paragraph 3, you don't recall it — you look at your marks and go straight there. Annotating turns Reading from a memory test into a find-it test, which is exactly what it should be. (This is also why a lot of students find the paper ACT easier for Reading than the screen version — marking up paper is effortless and there's no screen fatigue.)
The scanning drill
A specific skill worth practicing: locating a word or detail in a passage fast. A lot of Reading questions come down to "find the line this refers to," and if that hunt is slow, everything is slow. Train it directly — have someone name a random word from a passage you've read and race to point to it, or just practice skimming for a target term. It sounds almost too simple, but high scorers swear by it because so many questions reward it.
Science: it's a data-reading test, not a science test
The biggest mindset shift for the Science section: it is not testing whether you know biology or chemistry. It's testing whether you can read graphs, tables, and experiment descriptions quickly and pull the right number out. Treat it like a reading-comprehension section where the passages happen to be figures.
That changes your approach. For most Science passages:
- Don't read the intro prose first. Skim the first line or two for context, then go straight to the figures and the questions. Unlike Reading, questions-first genuinely works here — most answers live in the graphs, and you'll waste time reading background you don't need.
- Understand what each figure is showing before you touch the questions: what's on each axis, what the trend is, what changed between experiments. Once you "get" the figure, it often answers several questions at once.
- Watch for the handful of knowledge questions. A few Science questions do rely on common-knowledge science (basic biology, states of matter, that kind of thing). Recognize them, answer from what you know, and move on.
The through-line: find the trend, read the axes, trust the data over your gut.
So: read first, or questions first?
Now the contradiction resolves cleanly:
- Reading section → read the passage first (actively, annotating). Your memory of the marked passage is what makes the questions fast.
- Science section → questions and figures first. The data is the answer; the prose is mostly filler.
One rule, two applications. That's why the internet argues about it — people give a Reading answer to a Science question and vice versa.
Build the pacing, don't just hope for it
Because rushing is the real enemy, practice the pace, not just the content. Do sections untimed until the method is automatic, then add a generous clock and tighten gradually. Time each passage so you learn what a controlled pace actually feels like — it's usually slower than the panicked pace and more accurate. And take real breaks between practice sections; fatigue is what turns careful reading into skimming.
If a bad practice section happens, treat it as data: were the misses from rushing, from misreading a figure, or from a genuine gap? Change one thing and go again. The students who jump from a 25 to a 30+ in Reading, or a 21 to a 28 in Science, are almost never reading faster. They're reading once, carefully, and letting the marks and the figures do the remembering.
How PrepLion fits in: the Focus-mode tools are built for exactly this — one question at a time so you're not rushing to the next; a gentle nudge when you answer two in a row too fast (yes, it works in ACT practice too); read-aloud when reading fatigue is the bottleneck; and adaptive difficulty that eases off so you build correct reps before speed. Ordinary study aids for people who learn differently, not a medical or diagnostic feature.