Students may have received this message from ACT today:
Due to an internal ACT process, scores are on hold for some students who took the spring ACT online during the school day. If your score is no longer displayed, it will be released again no later than June 2, and your score will not decline—it will either see an increase or remain unchanged. You do not need to take any action. Any colleges and scholarship agencies you previously selected to receive your scores will receive those automatically. Our customer service team does not have access to scores absent from MyACT. We appreciate your patience and thank you for your understanding.
What does this mean? Who is impacted? How does a scoring error even happen?
This issue only impacts 11th grade students who took the ACT online during the school day as part of state-mandating testing in March or April (exact dates vary by school). If your student took the Nationwide April ACT (not the in-school ACT exam), they are not impacted.
What if your student is impacted? ACT has explicitly stated in several communications that scores will not decrease. Students will either receive the same score or a potentially higher score. The new scores will be available before June 2nd and will automatically update within the MyACT portal and be re-sent to any colleges or scholarship agencies previously selected to receive scores. There is nothing that students or parents need to do.
It’s important to remember that, while frustrating, this issue has no bearing on college or scholarship agencies’ perception of students. It is a nationwide problem that is solely a reflection of ACT.
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How does a scoring error even occur? Although ACT hasn’t identified the specific error, we have heard from reliable partners that there was an issue with the scale.
Standardized test scores are not merely the result of how many questions a student got correct or incorrect. Every iteration of a test also has a scaled score, which standardizes the difficulty level across multiple test forms. For example, missing 5 English questions on Test A, which had a challenging English section, will likely produce a higher score than missing 5 English questions on Test B, which had a very easy English section.
Part of a recent ACT’s scale score is below. The Raw Score is how many questions a student needs to get correct to achieve the Scale Score.
For instance, on this particular test, if a student got 34 questions correct on the English section, they received a scale score of 31 for the English section. However, if a student got 34 questions correct on another test, they might have a different score, based on how that other test’s scale was adjusted to account for the material’s difficulty.
Remember that every section is scored 1-36 and that the ACT averages the section scores for the English, Math, and Reading sections to get the student’s final composite score, which is also 1-36. The Science section no longer counts towards a student’s composite score.
Is it common for there to be an error in a scale? Perhaps early on in a test’s creation process. However, given the vast resources of ACT, it is extraordinary that a published test would have an issue of this magnitude.
If we learn more about this latest ACT score recalibration, we will let you know! If you have any further questions or concerns, don’t hesitate to contact one of our expert directors.