One of the things I dread most is having students tell me is that they "just need to get familiar with the test." Usually their idea of studying involves taking test after test, timing themselves assiduously, correcting themselves as soon as they finish, and then never looking at the tests again. Sometimes they'll go a bit further and review the questions they missed, but they virtually never go beyond studying the test itself.
They assume that if they see the same kinds of questions over and over again, they'll eventually deduce the rules for answering those questions and start getting them right. In other words, familiarity alone is enough to breed competence.
Unfortunately, unless your skills are already rock solid and all you truly do need is to get comfortable with the test, it doesn't usually work that way. From what I've observed, most people don't get questions wrong repeatedly because they're not sufficiently comfortable with them -- they get questions wrong because they don't know how to answer them! And usually it's nowhere near enough to simply keep trying to answer those questions and hoping that eventually something will click; to really improve, you have to learn the underlying rules that those questions test. That actually means forgetting about the test itself and going back to the basics.
If you think that everything that could possibly show up on the SAT or the ACT is covered in the official guides, I have some bad news for you. Those publications include enough information to give you most of the concepts you need to know, but the tests themselves may include unexpected variations on them. Just learning why a particular answer is right or wrong on a given test will get you nowhere if you can't understand the underlying rule it's testing and how it can be applied to a wide range of situations.
So what to do about this?
First, stop it with the full tests. You can take a couple before the real thing, but that's all you need. Go back through what you've done, figure out what section is giving you the most trouble, and focus on it. Spend 15-30 minutes a day reviewing material for it, but don't go overboard. Better to build your base knowledge slowly and see real results than try to cram and get nothing.
If you keep missing vocabulary questions but are ok on the passage-based reading, stop doing the passages and learn vocab and roots. You won't forget how to do the other in the meantime.
If the issue is the passage-based questions, just focus on those. Make sure you spend at least 15 minutes day not just reading challenging non-fiction but also practicing summarizing main points and outlining argument structures (introduction, supporting evidence, counter-example, etc.). Circle major transitions, and play the "what if this were a test passage?" game. Look for spots where ideas are being implied rather than stated or where words are being used in unexpected ways, and try to imagine what the SAT or the ACT would ask about them.
If the problem is grammar, start by working on identifying things like parts of speech, subjects, antecedents, and prepositional phrases. If you're having issues with those things, it will be incredibly hard for you to raise your score no matter how much you study. If you have particular trouble with verbs, get a grammar workbook and learn how verb tenses work; if you have problems with commas, just focus on commas, etc.
I'll say this with the caveat that I am beyond unqualified to talk about math, but if your major issue on that section is geometry, then just focus on that; same if it's algebra. Or Venn diagrams (which I loathed).
Now at this point you might be thinking, "but how am I supposed to work on the timing" if I'm just studying in little bits? The answer is that once you're more solid on the material, you no longer have to waste time puzzling endlessly over certain kinds of answers, and the time issue usually clears up pretty much on its own.
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