Good Score in ACT

ACT (American College testing) conducted by ACT Inc is required for admission to most of the colleges in all the 50 states of US and its territories. It is not a general aptitude or intelligence test. The exam is focused on skills in the areas of English, mathematics, vocabulary, and science. This exam is about a student’s knowledge in the subjects that he had studied while attending high school.

What is a good ACT Score

A good score in the test is used as a measure of the candidate’s ability to do well in the college. Depending upon the college, the test marks vary from being the most important selection factor to being a must have factor, regardless of the scores earned in the test. Every college has a different requirement of what constitutes “good” ACT results. Usually there are no fixed test score requirements of colleges, but a good result is one of the first things that stand out to someone reading your application for the admission. During the admission process, your class work, your GPA, extracurricular activities, ACT test scores, everything is important. If you do not have good high school grades then good marks in this examination can make up for it. It is therefore good to get high scores in this test to make yourself a competitive candidate for college. Therefore first thing you should do is research score is required for  admission in the special courses in the specific colleges and universities you are interested in. Most of the colleges publish these marks of the students who have got admissions in their colleges on their web sites. Once you are aware of the result for students who have got admissions into the schools you are interested in, you can target your test preparation to match or beat their results.

General ACT Scores

English, Reading, Mathematics and Science are the four test sections in ACT. There are a total of 215 multiple-choice questions. Time limit for completing the English section is 45 minutes and for Math section is 60 minutes. The time limit for both the Reading and Science sections is 35 minutes each. You have to answer 75 questions in the English section, 60 questions in the Math section, 40 questions in the Reading section and 40 questions in the Science section. The scores for each of the four sections range from 1 to 36. The average of these four scores is called the composite score. You can opt for the writing test in which you are given 30 minutes to write an essay and its scores range from 1 to 12. There are 12 different scores present in your score report. These are: 1 composite score, 7 sub-scores and 4 section scores. Your writing score will be displayed if you had opted for the writing test too. ACT’s official web site ( www.actstudent.org ) contains detailed information about scores.

The highest ACT score is 36. This is not an easy score to achieve. It is very difficult to decide what  a good score is. This varies from student to student. It depends upon which college and course you want to join. A good reputed college might expect a high score. And if you are applying for really an in-demand course then you have to score a really good score that may be more than 30. Usually a score of 27 or more is considered good. However, there might be some colleges who do not give much importance to the scores you receive in this test.