You can read more about this process on page 6 here. This is when the ACT® organization scales test scores from a range of past test dates so that they’re all comparable in the ability that is being tested. However, it is curved through a process known as equating. It’s important to note that the ACT® exam itself is not curved relative to test takers. The average ACT® Reading score was roughly 20.
The average ACT® Math score fell between 18-19. The average ACT® English score tended to fall between 19-20. This test is typically normalized around 20. When reviewing the ACT® scores national norms data, we found that the typical ACT® score ranges between 18-20 depending on the section.
There have been times in the past where students have not gotten every question right, but the acceptable raw score range for a 36 allows for a problem to have been missed.One good thing about the ACT® is that you actually have a small margin of error at times to still get a perfect score.
YES! A 36 on the ACT® is a great score and the equivalent of a perfect score. Exceptions would be if you had a particular edge in your application that would make you a unique candidate for consideration. That being said, based on historical trends, a 30 would put you within the historical classes at the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, Brown University, Columbia University, and Cornell University.įor Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, you’d most likely be on the outside looking in. Reason being that there are many considerations when applying to any elite university. Scoring a 30 on your ACT® may put you within striking distance of the Ivy Leagues, but it’s tough to say if it’d be good enough for gaining an acceptance into one. Is 30 on the ACT® good enough for Ivy Leagues? Schools with scores averaging around a 27 include Penn State University Park, Syracuse University, and Temple University. Yes! Scoring a 27 on the ACT® puts you in the 86th percentile of test takers. Typically falling in the high 20s will position you competitively for state colleges like University of Texas, Austin and University of California, Irvine.Īs you get into the 30s, you will enter the upper echelon of universities, with many top universities such as University of Virginia (known as a “Public Ivy”), as well as Top 25 schools like Northwestern, Georgetown, and Duke.įinally as you get into near perfect ACT® score territory (34-36), you’ll be highly competitive for the top schools in the nation such as Princeton, Harvard, and Yale. If you want to rank in the top 10% of all high school ACT® test takers, you’d need to score above a 28. Here’s a table of the typical percentiles for students taking the ACT®: ACT® Composite Score That translates to roughly a 23 on the ACT® for your composite score. That being said, generally speaking anything in the top 30% of all students taking the test is a decent place to be. It’s tough to give a cold hard number and call it a “good ACT® score”. In the two examples above, your raw scores would translate to a 34 on ACT® English and a 27 on ACT® Math if you were to refer to the official 2020-2021 practice test’s scoring charts. Your ACT® scale score is how your raw score translates to a section score ranging from 1-36. For example, ACT® English has 75 questions - if you got a 70, it means you got 70 of the multiple choice questions correct.ĪCT® Math has 60 questions - so if you got 43 questions right, your raw score would be a 43. Your ACT® raw score is equivalent to the number of questions you get correct on the test. What’s the difference between ACT® raw scores and ACT® scale scores? To compute your overall ACT® score, you take the average of all four sections (ACT® English, Mathematics, Reading, and Science divided by four). Scale scores range from 1-36, with 36 being the highest possible mark on the ACT®. All they care about is how many questions you got correct. The ACT® is easy to convert since there is no penalty involved with incorrect answers. By knowing how many questions you got right in each section, you can then reference a conversion table to see how that raw score translates to a scale score. To calculate your ACT® score, you’ll need to know your respective raw score in the four sections: English, Mathematics, Reading, and Science.