What's a Good ACT Score?

So you're looking at your first practice ACT® score or your first actual ACT score, and you have no idea what it means. What are all those numbers and charts doing there? While there is plenty of info on the ACT's score report, we'll jump straight to the good stuff: look for your composite score first. This is what everyone is talking about when they talk about "what they got" on the ACT.

On your score report, you'll see a chart that looks like this:

 

Now that you know your score, it's time to figure out if that score is any good. Well, we hate to break it to you champ, but "good" is really subjective. Here are some ways though to use your ACT score to figure out where you stand:

1. ACT College and Career Readiness Benchmarks

When the numbers are in, the ACT powers-that-be will fork over a comprehensive score report to you, complete with a series of benchmarks that will give you an idea of your college readiness. If "good" to you means "not falling into the red zone," benchmarks will tell you if you're where you need to be.

Supposedly, if you meet or exceed the benchmark, you'll have a 75-80% chance of earning at least a C and a 50% chance of earning a B or higher in your first semester of college.

Here's a chart showing where the ACT most recently set those benchmarks.

In addition to giving you benchmarks for each subject tested on the ACT (English, Mathematics, Reading, and Science), the ACT also re-crunches the numbers to give you a STEM score and benchmark, and an ELA score and benchmark. The STEM score tells you how well you would do in college courses like calculus, chemistry, biology, physics, and engineering; the ELA score estimates if you'd be able to succeed in history, psychology, sociology, English composition, and other such courses.

2. Average

If you don't have the time for benchmarks, checking out the mean score will be a quick indicator of how you measure up on the ACT. Did you do better than at least most people on the ACT? About two million students take it every year, and we're sure your ego could use a boost thinking about how many people you did better than.

If you're in the ballpark, you can expect that you're on the right track for college readiness.

3. College Goals

A good ACT score should be like that trusty old beater car that you inherited when your big sister went to college: it might not be mind-blowingly beautiful, but it gets you where you need to go.

If you're aiming for a highly selective Ivy League university, for example, admissions officers might be tempted by a student scoring between 34 and 36. If you're all about the honor and bravery of, say, Michigan State University's Spartan life, charging into the admissions fray armed with a 23 composite score would give you a fighting chance, while a 28 on the ACT would make you stand out from the rest of the admissions pool.

On this website, you can check out the Fall 2017 stats for enrolled first-year students of your dream school. Looking at what the 75th percentile of those students scored will help you gauge how you can rise to the top of the application pool with your ACT score. Of course, admission officers will still be casting a critical eye upon the rest of your application—a student who only submitted a perfect ACT score but no transcript would not even be considered, since that would make his or her application incomplete. Getting a score below the 25th percentile of their admitted students, meanwhile, might make the standardized testing portion of your application a weakness.

Here's a chart of some highly selective schools and what their first-year students scored in the Fall of 2017:

Note this number doesn't show accepted students…just those who actually ended up committing to that particular university. 

Here's a chart of the standardized test scores for some schools with awesome basketball teams, if that's your thing: 

Scoring at or a smidge below a school's 25th percentile mark means you could still be a contender, but you'll have to balance out your application in other ways, such as stellar accomplishments and a pristine GPA. Scoring at or above a school's 75th percentile mark means that your ACT score might help make you a more likely candidate.

What is the average ACT score?

The average ACT composite score, for the 2018 graduating class, was 20.8. Over the past few years, it has hovered around that mark.

Around two million students take the ACT every year, so that means if you get a score of 21, you did better than at least half of the people who take the test.

Here's how that panned out across the different ACT tests in 2018: 

You're probably wondering: how many questions do I have to get right in order to inch myself above that "average" mark? Check out what you would have had to have scored on each section of the test to find yourself in the right ballpark. This changes a bit with each test, but looking at this information from a previous ACT will help you know what you should aim for.

What's a good ACT Writing score?

Again, you'll need to mix up the average score, your target score based on your school(s) of choice, and the ACT's benchmark to cook up a "good" score for you. Think of it like a hotpot: you can add as much of the ingredients that are tasty or important to you to figure out if your soup, or rather your score, meets your standards. 

First, figure out if the schools you're aiming for require the ACT Writing Test.

Then, keep in mind that the average ACT Writing score for the graduating class of 2018 was 6.5. 

Finally, you'll want to keep in mind that the ACT Writing score will be thrown in together with your Reading and English Test scores, and you'll get an average score for your ELA abilities. The ELA benchmark that the ACT declares makes you "college ready" is usually around 20, so ideally your Writing score should help boost you above this. However, because the ACT uses a secret sauce to convert Writing scores (assigned a value from 2-12) into something that can be averaged into your ELA score, you won't always know what this should be. In order to arrive at a final score, they give different weights to each individual rubric used to arrive at your final point tally. Here's a conversion chart though where you can guesstimate how they will crunch the numbers:

What will be on my score report?

This isn't the evil empire or anything. None of the ACT exam graders are plotting your downfall, fingers tented Mr. Burns' style. No, the folks over there are good people. They will count every answer that you get right on each of the four tests. They'll then convert that number of right answers into a scaled score between 1 and 36.

They'll also show you a chart of whether or not your scores meet their College Readiness Benchmarks for each test. And finally, they'll give you a breakdown of each section and how you did in particular subcategories. If you're taking the ACT again, this breakdown for each test will give you vital info on what skills you need to work on.

The good folks at the ACT have found a sacrificial lamb and revealed her private data so that you can see a real student score report. Just kidding. The student is probably just a fictional character, dreamed up by some standardized test researchers.

When will I receive my ACT Score?

Like a honey bee waggle dance, ACT scores are released in waves. Some students will get their scores within ten days of taking the test, the next batch of students will have to wait about a week longer than that, and the next batch will have to wait even two weeks longer. Some students will have to wait patiently for up to eight weeks after sitting for the exam. The ACT has put together a chart of score release dates, but they also specify that they can't always keep their promises.

If you took the ACT Writing Test, your scores for that section will take a bit longer to be released. All scores will be delivered to your online ACT web account.

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