Although not a college entrance exam, incoming bright-eyed college students worry about the ACCUPLACER test because of how it can affect their future.?
This is because not being able to ?pass it? will force them to take a number of remedial classes throughout the entirety of their college years, preventing them from focusing completely on the subjects or courses that actually matter to them in the long run. ?
In worst-case scenarios, this can affect their grades tremendously, which can in turn ruin their chances of landing an internship at the company of their choice or even their chances of being hired.
As a result, a lot of students take an ACCUPLACER mock test, both to see how well they can do on the exam without preparation and to see which areas they need to improve, as well as to familiarize themselves with the sections or subjects in it.
Let?s take a look at them in detail so that you can have an idea of what to expect in the sections of the actual ACCUPLACER test on test day.
Reading Comprehension
Seen by many as the easiest part of the ACCUPLACER test, the questions included in this section are designed to measure the extent of your reading comprehension skills by presenting you with a number of passages of varying length and it will be your job to figure out the main idea, purpose, tone, or even author?s intent.
In some cases, you will encounter questions where you will have to determine how true or false an inference is based on the details present in the passage.
Sentence Skills
In this section of the ACCUPLACER exam, your mastery of the Standard English Conventions will be tested.
Although there are a lot of variations, questions will usually revolve around you needing to read a sentence or passage, then you will have to revise, retain, or delete parts of it to improve its readability.
Questions on sentence structure, as well as what type of organization was used, can also be expected.
Apart from testing your grammar skills, you will also have to show a good grasp on parallelism, conjunctions, subject-verb agreement, possessive determiners, modifier placement, pronoun clarity, and frequently confused words.
You can also expect questions that will ask you which punctuation is the best one to use in order to improve a sentence.
Arithmetic
We are now entering the more difficult parts of the ACCUPLACER exam that you cannot afford to underestimate with how complex they can be.?
In this section, you will encounter questions revolving around the concepts of fundamental arithmetics such as the four basic operations, decimals, fractions, percentages, equivalents, and number comparisons.
Elementary Algebra
On top of the main operations, you will need to know how to solve equations that use integers and rational numbers, algebraic expressions, exponents, and inequalities.
While some questions will be formulaic in nature, you can also expect a number of word problems popping up now and then.
Quantitative Reasoning, Statistics, and College Algebra
Undoubtedly the most difficult section to tackle in the ACCUPLACER considering how complex the calculations can be on top of the fact that not everyone is familiar with how to easily or properly solve the subjects contained within.
When you take the ACCUPLACER exam, you can expect this section to have questions revolving around descriptive statistics, linear applications and graphs, probability and sets, and algebraic expressions.
Are there other sections in the ACCUPLACER Test?
By technicality, the five aforementioned sections above make up the entirety of the main ACCUPLACER exam.
However, there is another section that can be incredibly difficult due to how fluid or free-form it is.
This is the essay-writing section of the ACCUPLACER, sometimes called as the Writeplacer assessment.
Generally, you will be supplied with a short passage containing a topic which can range from old studies to current social issues, and it will be your job to write an essay discussing your stance on the subject.
Contrary to popular belief, your agreement or disagreement towards the topic has little to no bearing on how you will be scored by the proctors or assessors of the test.
Instead, you will be graded on how well you managed to write your essay.
This means that you will get points based on the presence or absence of any grammatical or punctuation mistakes, how organized the essay is, how relevant the examples you provided are in relation to the topic, as well as how good your sentence variety or style is.
Although writing a long essay can help you get points, especially if you know a lot of relevant examples or studies to cite, it is common for students to get a high or even perfect score with only five paragraphs.
As a result, you should focus on writing an essay well instead of trying to beat around the bush in an attempt to increase its length in order to get more points.
