If you are interested in taking the COMPASS tests, you could download some practice questions, e.g., in math and reading, in pdf form.
They describe the type of calculators you can use on the math test; looks like you could use a graphing calculator such as the TI-83 or -84. I recommend you take advantage of it!
The site also has some general sample questions and general information about the test.
The Online Writing Lab of Roane State Community College some descriptions of various types of essay, with examples. I have looked at some of this, but not all.
You can read some discussion of essay types and some examples of essays here:
Classic essays (good stuff here!!)
But if you want some real help on writing for the SAT and ACT, give me a call!
Here are some grammar/writing texts I’d recommend:
Writing and Thinking by Foerster and Steadman — Jean Moroney has a review of the book on the Website of the bookseller The Paper Tiger.
Dictionary of English Usage by Fowler (avoid the third edition!!) — You can download a pdf of the Dictionary (1927 edition) on the Website of the Internet Archive.
Woe is I by Patricia O’Conner — Jessica Mocle has a review of the book on the Website of the Dallas-Fort Worth Society for Technical Communication.
Rex Barks by Phyllis Davenport — Lisa VanDamme has a good review of the book on her blog Pedagogically Correct.
I have read the first and last; the other two I’ve had recommended to me (from reliable sources); I have not looked at them myself, so I’m not sure about the quality, but I’m expecting they are good.
This information, by the way, is critical for doing well on the “writing” section of the SAT and ACT.
Read the Federalist No. 10 and the Declaration of Independence — and study them, analyze them, look at the structure and content of the whole, and look at how the parts make up and relate to the whole. We could learn a great deal from their content, grammar, structure, and stylistic elements.
Writing and grammar are skills we need to master in order to master reasoning. So they are skills students should work at hard in school; plus writing and grammar are tested on the SAT, ACT, etc.!! But they are also skills all adults should work hard to hone and improve; life and human nature demand it of us.
Here is an excerpt from the Federalist No. 10:
By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adversed to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.
There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.
There are again two methods of removing the causes of faction: the one, by destroying the liberty which is essential to its existence; the other, by giving to every citizen the same opinions, the same passions, and the same interests.
It could never be more truly said than of the first remedy, that it was worse than the disease. Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.
This is a real-life example of a sentence the SAT or ACT might give you to test your grammar and writing skills:
If kids want to become an electrician, dance instructor, plumber or tattoo artist, we see no shame or failure for those students.
(from “Focus on school equality for sake of ‘kids in middle’ ” by Chris Barbic, July 14, 2009, 10:15PM, Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle.)
Is there an error(s) in the sentence, or is it good as is?
An iconoclast is “a breaker or destroyer of images, esp. those set up for religious veneration;” or “a person who attacks cherished beliefs, traditional institutions, etc., as being based on error or superstition.” From iconoclastic. Dictionary.com. Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1). Random House, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/iconoclastic (accessed: January 23, 2009).
The American Heritage Dictionary says:
The original iconoclasts destroyed countless works of art. Eikonoklastēs, the ancestor of our word, was first formed in Medieval Greek from the elements eikōn, “image, likeness,” and -klastēs, “breaker,” from klān, “to break.” The images referred to by the word are religious images, which were the subject of controversy among Christians of the Byzantine Empire in the 8th and 9th centuries, when iconoclasm was at its height. … It is around this time [the Protestant Reformation] that iconoclast, the descendant of the Greek word, is first recorded in English (1641), with reference to the Byzantine iconoclasts. In the 19th century iconoclast took on the secular sense that it has today…. From iconoclastic. Dictionary.com. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/iconoclastic (accessed: January 23, 2009).
There is more information on Dictionary.com’s iconoclast page, of course.
George Washington gave his First Inaugural Address on Thursday, April 30, 1789. He said:
Fellow-Citizens of the Senate and of the House of Representatives:
AMONG the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years—a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions all I dare aver is that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me, and its consequences be judged by my country with some share of the partiality in which they originated.
Thomas Jefferson gave his Second Inaugural Address on Monday, March 4, 1805. He said:
PROCEEDING, fellow-citizens, to that qualification which the Constitution requires before my entrance on the charge again conferred on me, it is my duty to express the deep sense I entertain of this new proof of confidence from my fellow-citizens at large, and the zeal with which it inspires me so to conduct myself as may best satisfy their just expectations.
On taking this station on a former occasion I declared the principles on which I believed it my duty to administer the affairs of our Commonwealth. My conscience tells me I have on every occasion acted up to that declaration according to its obvious import and to the understanding of every candid mind.
In the transaction of your foreign affairs we have endeavored to cultivate the friendship of all nations, and especially of those with which we have the most important relations. We have done them justice on all occasions, favored where favor was lawful, and cherished mutual interests and intercourse on fair and equal terms. We are firmly convinced, and we act on that conviction, that with nations as with individuals our interests soundly calculated will ever be found inseparable from our moral duties, and history bears witness to the fact that a just nation is trusted on its word when recourse is had to armaments and wars to bridle others.
At home, fellow-citizens, you best know whether we have done well or ill. The suppression of unnecessary offices, of useless establishments and expenses, enabled us to discontinue our internal taxes. These, covering our land with officers and opening our doors to their intrusions, had already begun that process of domiciliary vexation which once entered is scarcely to be restrained from reaching successively every article of property and produce. If among these taxes some minor ones fell which had not been inconvenient, it was because their amount would not have paid the officers who collected them, and because, if they had any merit, the State authorities might adopt them instead of others less approved.
You can find some algebra and prealgebra course tests to practice with at Hotmath.com; some geometry worksheets at Tutor-usa.com; and some algebra and geometry worksheets at Glencoe.com.
Hotmath.com also has some videos to show you some basic things about the TI-83/84.
All three sites have other useful material; click around, see what you find.
On Texas Instruments’ Website, they have a variety of useful, downloadable applications for their calculators — which calculators you can use on the SAT and ACT. You can get a list of area formulas, a Cabri Jr geometry app, a Geomaster geometry app, a conic sections app, a transformations app, an inequalities app, and a polynomial root-finder/systems of equations solver app. Some of these applications might already be installed on your calculator, “straight from the factory.” They also have an application that “provides an easy-to-use interface so you can enter the math problem the same way you see it in your textbook, thereby reinforcing math notation and students’ understanding.”
These are the only applications that would help on the SAT and ACT, I think. But you would need to be able to use the applications quickly — time is of the essence when taking the SAT or ACT. So practice, practice, practice. If you can’t use an app quickly, don’t use it on the test, unless you have gone through a whole math section, done what you could, and have some time left to play.
There is a list of all applications available on their TI-83 and TI-84 applications page.
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