As a high school junior, you are probably familiar with the ACT by now. If you’re like most students, your first experience with this important standardized test came at the end of your sophomore year. Since then, you’ve learned a lot more about the ACT. You know that it’s one of two college admissions tests (the other is the SAT) that nearly all four-year colleges require for admission. You’ve also likely heard about how the ACT is changing its scoring system in September 2015.

The new changes to the ACT are pretty significant, so you may be wondering how they will affect your test prep and study strategy. This article will address those concerns by explaining what exactly is changing and how these changes will impact your studying for the ACT.

What is Changing?

The biggest change to the ACT is that it will no longer deduct points for incorrect answers. The current policy for scoring on the ACT is to deduct ¼ point for each wrong answer on multiple choice questions (except on English, which does not penalize you for incorrect answers). In September 2015, however, this policy will be reversed: the ACT will no longer deduct points for wrong answers to multiple choice questions. In addition to this big change, there are

With the changes to the ACT’s scoring system, it is now more important than ever to understand what you need to score on the test to get into your dream school. In this post, I’ll detail exactly how the scoring system works and how you can use this information to your advantage when studying.

The old system used two subscores for English, Math, Reading, and Science. These subscores were then averaged together for a composite score between 1 and 36. For example, if you got a 28 on English and a 25 on Math, then your composite score would be 26.5. The new system eliminates subscores and instead gives one overall score for each subject area between 1 and 18. This means that if you get a 28 on English and 25 on Math in the old system, you would get an overall 16 on English (28 divided by 2) and an overall 13 on Math (25 divided by 2). So while in the old system you would have scored a 26.5 overall, in the new system you would score a 14.5 overall (16 plus 13 divided by 2).

The change from subscores to overall scores is significant because students can no longer hide their weaknesses in certain areas behind their strengths in other areas. If a student was good

Whether you’re taking the test for the first time or retaking it to improve your previous score, it’s important that you understand how the ACT is scored. If you know how the ACT works and what the test expects of you, you can study more effectively and reach your ideal score in a shorter amount of time.

In this article, I’ll go over how the ACT’s new scoring system works, including some sample questions and answers to give you an idea of what will be tested on the test.

ACT Scoring Basics: The ACT is scored out of 36 points. You are given a separate score for each of the four ACT test sections (English, math, reading, and science). The composite score is the average of these four scores, so your highest composite score can be 36.

ACT Section Scores: Each section’s raw score is based on the number of questions you answered correctly. Each section has its own section raw score range: English (36-75), Math (25-60), Reading (33-67), Science (29-54). The ACT does not penalize you for wrong answers; therefore, it is always better to guess than to leave a question blank! However, guessing should be strategic– after eliminating obviously incorrect answers, select

As you may have heard, the ACT is changing its scoring system. Starting in September of 2016, the ACT is no longer going to penalize you for wrong answers. In fact, it’s not even going to give you a score for each individual test—instead, it’s going to combine your English and Reading scores into one English score, and your Math and Science scores into one STEM score.

So what does this mean for you? Well, it means that your ACT score is going to be harder to understand than ever before. But it also means that you have more freedom than ever before when you take the test: there’s no reason to leave any question blank!

The new scoring system will also make it a lot easier to compare ACT scores across years. Previously, when some questions were harder than others, or when the curve was steeper than normal (as happened this past February), it was hard to know if your score was better or worse than someone else’s who took the test earlier or later. Now we can compare our students from year to year with a lot more confidence (and we can do so on an apples-to-apples basis).

But—and this may be the most important thing for

In its new version, the ACT will no longer report a student’s subscores on the science and writing portions of the test. The meaning of this change may be confusing to students who are preparing for the exam, but it is actually quite simple to understand. The ACT has found that reporting subscores was essentially useless as a measure of student proficiency. Because subscores were not very helpful in understanding how well or poorly students did on different portions of the test, the ACT decided to eliminate them. In fact, most students probably never even looked at their subscores! They only paid attention to their composite score.

To clarify this issue more fully, consider an analogy – think about what happens when you take your car in for repairs. If you take your car into a mechanic, he will not just focus on one part of your car (such as an oil change). He checks all aspects of your car and reports to you whether everything is working correctly or not. That is what he does for a living: he looks at your whole car, makes sure everything works right, and then reports back to you with his findings.

What if the mechanic didn’t do that? Suppose he only looked at one aspect of your car – say, just its tires. Suppose further that this

The ACT and SAT have been long-time rivals in the college-entrance testing world. While both tests have many similarities, the ACT has recently become more and more popular among students, causing it to gain an advantage over the SAT. This recent trend has caused the College Board, the makers of the SAT, to revamp their test to make it more like the ACT. The current version of the SAT also now includes an essay section that is optional, much like the essay on the ACT. Because of these changes, it’s important for students to understand how the new scoring system works so that they can plan accordingly for their test preparation.

The ACT has always been divided into four multiple-choice sections: English, Math, Reading, and Science Reasoning. Now that the SAT has switched from two 800-point sections (Math and Critical Reading) to three 800-point sections (Math, Evidence-Based Reading and Writing, and Essay), this makes both tests similar in structure. Both tests are also graded on a scale of 0 to 36 points per section rather than 1 to 1600 points overall.

Many students believe that taking these tests in a particular order will help them score better on each section; however, this is not true since all multiple choice responses are

Now that the ACT has added a new “optional” writing section, many people have been wondering how exactly this new section will affect their ACT score. In an attempt to add a little more clarity to this question, I created a handy table that shows you the maximum number of points you can get in each section and the maximum possible total score with and without the writing test. The weight of each section is also provided on the table below:

Section Max