If the answer to the question "What's a good ACT score?" has you awake at night, then read the info below. You'll understand whether or not you need to schedule a retake to get the ACT score you really want.
Each section on the ACT – English, Math, Reading and Science – can earn you anywhere between a 1 (low) and a 36 (high). Your final ACT score (also between 1-36) is the average of those four scores. What does this mean? If you're great at Math, but need help with Reading, your composite ACT score can be much lower than it needs to be.
Obviously, not everyone is going to get that perfect ACT score, a 36. So what is a good ACT score? What do the colleges require? Where do you fit in?
Average 2008 ACT Scores by Section:
- Math: 21
- English: 20.6
- Science: 20.8
- Reading:21.4
- Total: 21
To get into a good school, however, you're going to have to do better than that! Here are the 75th percentile scores (25% of the entering students received this score or higher) for some of the best universities in the country:
- California Institute of Technology (CIT): 35
- Harvard: 35
- Duke: 34
- Notre Dame: 34
- Amherst: 34
- Rice: 34
- Dartmouth: 34
- MIT: 34
- Yale: 34
- Princeton: 34
- Emory: 33
- Johns Hopkins: 33
- Tufts: 33
- University of Chicago: 33
- Stanford: 33
- Georgetown: 33
- Brown: 33
- Northwestern: 33
- Columbia: 33
- Cornell: 32
