“I’m so bummed that I scored a 25 on the English ACT.” “I can’t believe my ACT Science score is so low!” “I really need a 29 on ACT Math. How can I ever get my 22 up to a 29? That seems impossible.”
Many a standardized testing conundrum could be resolved easily with some simple knowledge: the knowledge of the test’s scale, that is, how a student’s raw score gets scaled to a score on ACT’s 1 through 36 scale. At Academic Approach we live, sleep, eat, and breath test data and minutiae so that we can distill such byzantine knowledge into bite-sized digestible bits for our clients.
I’ve attached an official ACT raw-to-scaled-score conversion table (ACT Scaling) so you can study these grading details on your own; however, in an effort to glean some insight from this data, let me isolate one point:
You’ll note—especially higher up on the scale—that by simply scoring one more question correctly, you would score one full scaled-score point. For example, scoring 67 out of 75 correct on the ACT English yields a 29 while scoring 68 out of 75 correct yields a 30. In short, one correct answer often equals one point on the scaled score.
For the student overwhelmed at the prospect of improving a score, this rather fluid scale should be encouraging. The significance? Simply clean up a few careless errors and improve substantially!