Before you begin preparing for the ACT, it’s important to have a sense of what your score goals are. Knowing approximately what score you’re aiming for is important for many aspects of your prep, from planning for how many times you should take the test all the way to deciding how to allocate your time during the preparation process. Inevitably, though, many students are curious about the same thing: what exactly is a “good” ACT score? In this post, we’ll strive to answer that question.
How is the ACT scored?
It’s pretty hard to get a good score on the ACT if you don’t first, you know, understand the test is scored. Let’s start our discussion of what constitutes a “good” ACT score with a quick review of the scoring mechanics.
There are four sections on the ACT—English, Math, Reading, Science—and you’ll receive an individual score for each one. There are two components to each section score: raw score and scaled score.
Raw Scores
Your raw score is extremely simple to calculate. Each question on the ACT is worth 1 raw score point, and there is no penalty for wrong answers. (As a corollary, this is the part where I risk dishonoring my profession and my family if I don’t remind you that you should always guess on any questions that you can’t answer, as there’s no difference score-wise between getting a question wrong and leaving it blank.)
Because of this, your raw score in a given section is simply the number of questions you answered correctly in that section. If you answered 33/40 questions correctly in the Reading section, for instance, your raw score for that section would be a 33.
Scaled Scores
Once you have your raw scores for the various sections, the next step is converting them into scaled scores, which range from 1 to 36.
The ACT uses scaled scores to account for the differences in difficulty between test administrations. For instance, let’s say that you and a friend took the test on different dates and you both got 48/60 questions correct on the Math section. If the Math section that you took was more difficult than your friend’s, then it’s fair to say that your performance was more impressive, even though you both got the same raw score.
The test addresses this using a process called equating. By comparing the difficulty of a given section to the last several years’ worth of data about that section from other test administrations, the ACT can adjust the scoring curve to compensate for differences in difficulty. So in our example, despite the fact that you and your friend got the same raw score, it’s likely that you would have gotten a slightly higher scaled score because your section was harder and therefore would have had a friendlier conversion curve.
Composite Scores
After your individual scores are calculated for all four sections of the ACT, the final step is combining those into an overall composite score. This part is easy: your composite score is simply the average of your four section scores, rounded according to standard rounding rules. So if you scored a 27 in English, a 29 in Math, a 26 in Reading, and a 28 in Science, the average of those four scores would be a 27.5, which would round up to a 28 composite (and would show up on your score report as a 28, not a 27.5).
It’s important to note that the optional ACT Writing Section, or ‘essay’, does not contribute to your composite score at all. If you choose to take the essay, you’ll receive a separate score (ranging from 2 to 12) for that portion of the test, and that score will be displayed on the score report that you send to colleges as a supplement to your composite score.
Superscores
IT FINALLY HAPPENED. At long last, as of early 2021, the ACT will now provide an automatically calculated superscore to all students who have taken the ACT more than once from September 2016 to the current day. When you select the test dates from which you want to submit results to colleges, the ACT automatically pulls your highest score for each section out of those dates and displays those four scores at the top of the score report, along with a composite superscore.
As an example, let’s say that you took the test twice. In February, your scores looked like this:
- English: 33
- Math: 27
- Reading: 32
- Science: 27
- Composite: 30
Before the April test, you decided to focus most of your time and energy on bringing up your scores on the STEM half of the test. As a result, your April results came back like so:
- English: 30
- Math: 31
- Reading: 28
- Science: 32
- Composite: 30
When you submit scores to colleges, assuming you elect to include the scores from both test administrations, the top of your score report would include a superscore section that looked something like this:
- English (February): 33
- Math (April): 31
- Reading (February): 32
- Science (April): 32
- Composite Superscore: 32
The benefits of this are clear: that 32 is noticeably higher than either of the individual composite scores you earned on the February and April test dates, which puts you in a better position to be competitive with other applicants.
It is important to note that while the ACT will automatically include a superscore section on your score report, they cannot force schools to use that score when evaluating your application. Some schools may prefer to use your highest single composite score instead, for instance.
Because of that fact, it should come as no surprise that knowing which of your prospective schools superscore and which don’t is a vital part of figuring out what a good ACT score is for you; make sure you’re doing your research! Remember that for the most accurate information about how an individual school handles superscoring, you should contact that school’s admissions department directly.
What’s a good ACT score?
Now that you have a firm grasp on how to interpret ACT scores, let’s return to the central question of this post: what’s a good ACT score?
As you might expect, the answer to this question varies from student to student. If your dream school is MIT, for instance, you should be aiming to get a whopping 36 on the ACT to be in the 75th percentile of first-year undergraduate applicants (yeah, MIT is a pretty decent school). On the other hand, if your heart is set on a school in the University of California system, which is entirely test-blind, a good ACT score for you is no ACT score at all! So the easiest way to answer this question in something approaching a universal fashion is to simply say that a good ACT score is one that makes you a competitive applicant to the school(s) you’d be interested in attending.
The best way to begin answering this question for yourself, then, is to generate a list of schools you’re interested in and research score statistics for each. Test scores are one piece of information that applicants can use to sort their prospective future academic homes into the three categories beloved by college counselors everywhere—reach schools, target schools, and safety schools. Most schools provide data regarding the test scores of at least their most recent admitted class on the admissions portions of their website, so that’s a great place to start.
If you’re not at the point yet where you’ve started assembling that list of schools and simply want to get a general picture of where your scores stand relative to those of other students, check out ACT.org’s most recent data on nationwide score percentiles. Or, if you don’t feel like analyzing a table, here are some selected benchmark composite scores and their associated percentiles (relative to score data from ACT-tested high school graduates from 2020, 2021, and 2022) to give you a rough sense of how the numbers shake out overall.
- 36: 100th percentile
- 32: 96th percentile
- 28: 89th percentile
- 24: 76th percentile
- 20: 56th percentile
What are the average Ivy League ACT scores?
Whenever I’m discussing score goals with my students, it’s not uncommon for the conversation to turn to curiosity about admissions requirement for some of the best schools in the country. Everybody knows that one kid who got a 35 on the ACT or a 1480 on the SAT without even doing any prep—what doors did that open for them? What are the average ACT scores that it takes to get into an Ivy League school like Harvard or Columbia?
But First, A Piece of Unsolicited Advice
Look, the Ivy League is composed of unequivocally fantastic schools. There’s a reason names like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are used as benchmarks of academic excellence. And if you absolutely have your heart set on one of those illustrious institutions, feel free to skip this portion of the post.
If you’re here because you’re doing initial research, though, or even just because you’re curious, I would be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to say this: there are so many phenomenal schools outside of the Ivy League. No, really—higher education does in fact exist outside of the Northeastern United States. I promise.
Joking (but not really) aside, the best advice I can give to anyone in the early stages of the college search process is to start as broad as possible. Think about more than the name on the front of the building. Consider location, size, cost, and the specific strength of the school’s academic programs in any particular areas you’re already passionate about. This country has an incredible number of places where you can get a fantastic education, and the vast majority of them aren’t Ivy League schools. Don’t be so focused on applying to the “best” schools that you miss out on the best school for you.
Average Ivy League ACT Scores
Below is a list I’ve compiled of ACT composite score ranges for Ivy League schools. The first number is the 25th percentile score (so the score that would place you at or above the level of a quarter of the admitted students that year), while the second is the 75th percentile. All numbers come from the IPEDS database, provided by the National Center for Education Statistics, and represent the stats for the application class of Fall 2021.
- Brown University: 33-35
- Columbia University: 34-35
- Cornell University: 33-35
- Dartmouth College: 33-35
- Harvard University: 33-36
- University of Pennsylvania: 33-35
- Princeton University: 33-35
- Yale University: 33-35
Unsurprisingly, the trend is pretty consistent, and the takeaway is clear: if you want ACT scores that are competitive with the Brown median or the Dartmouth median, you’re aiming for roughly a 34 composite.
It’s also interesting to note that the ACT English scores that represented the 25th and 75th percentiles were higher than the corresponding ACT Math scores for all eight Ivy League schools. Yale, for instance, had an English range of 35-36 but a Math range of “only” 31-35.
It’s likely that this has more to do with the relative strengths of students who choose to submit ACT scores versus those who choose to submit SAT scores than with any kind of preference on the part of the schools (particularly because the percentiles of SAT scores for admitted students showed the exact opposite trend); however, it does mean that your application may stand out slightly more if you apply with an extremely high ACT Math score. Whether that really makes any kind of a difference during the evaluation process is a question that I’ll leave to the admissions experts.
How do I get better at the ACT?
Whether your dream school is an Ivy or someplace as far away from the winters in the Northeast as possible, why not amble over and take a gander at GoTutor’s ACT prep headquarters? Our squad of test gurus have designed an ACT curriculum based on their years of experience helping students get better at the ACT, and they would love for you to use it to get better at the test and hit whatever score you’re aiming for.