ACT Writing Score: Rescored dramatically, what are you doing ACT???

That’s shocking, but wonderful news for you !

Did ACT write you a check or did they return your original check?

@ga1982 They wrote me a check that arrived about 2 months ago.

@mathyone Not sure what you mean. Could you clarify what you’re referring to?

@rubyyy
http://www.act.org/content/act/en/newsroom/act-will-move-to-2-to-12-score-range-for-act-writing-test-result.html

“Beginning this fall with the September national test date, ACT will no longer report ACT writing test scores on a 1-to-36 scale. To reduce confusion among users, the writing score will instead be reported on a range of 2-to-12, with 12 being the highest possible score.”

"Last year, ACT revised the optional writing test and began converting results to a 1-to-36 score scale to be consistent with the multiple-choice ACT test scores. This change, however, caused confusion among students who attempted to interpret their writing score in comparison to their multiple choice test scores. Each ACT subject test measures different skills, and many students earn higher scores on some tests than on others.

“Our customers have spoken, and we have listened…Converting the writing results to a 1-to-36 scale made sense conceptually, but in practice it created confusion among some students. We clearly understand that now, and we are making this change to eliminate the confusion.”

… “Converting the writing scores to the 1-to-36 scale may have made the differences in scores seem larger or more obvious. This is really a perceptual problem that we are addressing.”

Yes, it’s “confusion”, “confusion”, “confusion”, “confusion”, and a “perceptual problem” among the students. Not bogus scoring. Yes, the differences between scores were more obvious. We can’t have that, because it calls into question the ACT’s scoring.

@mathyone Interesting…In my opinion it seems like they just screwed up my writing score all together. If they really think it was just student “confusion” I don’t see why they’d raise my score and refund my money in full. Obviously if it’s on the same scale as the other tests, students are going to hope for a competitive score (about 29+) on that section. Honestly, I don’t know anyone who got initially something over a 29 on the writing. Definitely seemed questionable and I’m not sure just changing the scale is going to fix that.

Of course it’s not “confusion”. Their scoring is bogus, as is evident from the flood of huge changes upon rescores and the apparent lack of correlation between verbal scores and writing scores.

^of course not; they just realized the randomness of their scoring was made clear and they reverted to obfuscating things. They’re not going to fix their system, which relies on overworked/underpaid people having to score as many essays as they can, as quickly as they can.