<p>Add your scores together and divide by four. Round to the nearest whole number. For example, if someone got a 33, 33, 34, 34, his score would be a 34 (33.5 rounds to 34).</p>
<p>I can't remember the odds, but it is actually harder to get a 2400 on the SAT, something like 1 in 10,000 people for the SAT and like 1 in 2,000 or 5,000 for the ACT. You can have 36,36,35,35. Or 36,35,34,36, or something like that to make it round up to a 36.</p>
<p>36,36,35,35... 36,36,34,36... 36,36,36,36... 35,36,36,36 are all 36's</p>
<p>and the curve sometimes, depending on difficulty, could be -1 = 36 (like on the april math section)...... it could also be -1 = 34 (HARSH!! - like the April reading section)</p>
<p>does math have a more generous curve to it, allowing it to get one wrong and still maintain a perfect score? I’m guessing it’s not always the case, but is it mostly?</p>
<p>The ACT does not curve like the SAT. If you get one wrong it is automatically a 35. The only way to get a 36 is by getting all of the questions right on that section.</p>
<p>And i actually mean for the higher end… The higher end of the scores are rounded down…</p>
<p>I remember a couple of months ago I took my first ACT reading practice test and i worked out my score using a proportion (66/75 =x/36), and eventually got a score of 31.68… I was pretty happy with my score till i looked at the conversion table and realized I actually only got a 28…</p>
<p>The English section usually isn’t curved very much but sometimes other sections like math have a generous curve…well more generous than normal anyway.</p>
<p>i had the same experience with mcgraw hill’s book, but i wouldn’t go by that. i just go by what i got, and i dont add or subtract on my practice tests. it tends to only go up a little and not down</p>
<p>so can it be said that improving on the act is easier? just by getting 7 more correct on the English section, the score jumps from a 26 to a 31.</p>
<p>pr022x thats completely false… Look at the percentages of people who score a 36 vs a 2400… the difference is 99.97 percentile vs 99.98 for the sat. Big whoop.</p>
<p>However the difference in scarcity is almost entirely the result of the different means used to calculate top scores. The ACT composite score represents an average of four sections whereas the SAT combined score represents a total of three sections. In order to compare the two top scores directly one would have to either count the frequency of combined ACT scores (top score would be 144) or count the frequency of average SAT section scores (top score would be 800, rounded to the nearest ten). </p>
<p>The ACT does not release data pertaining to combined scores, although one could presume that the frequency of 144’s would be far less than that of 36’s (which, after all, could result from a combined 142 or 143, too). It is probably much rarer than an SAT 2400, too, but such scores are simply “unadvertised”. Still, the SAT does release the total count of 2390’s, 204, which would also average to 800 on a section basis. Thus the total number of SAT 800-average scores would be 588. Moreover, because the SAT has three sections rather than four, generously “rounding up” a 0.5 fraction is not applicable. The nearest we can do to mimic this practice is to include half of the count of 2380’s in the count of 800’s, or half of 301 = 150. Add that to the total and we get 738 800-average scores.</p>
<p>Thus if the top scores were calculated in similar ways for both tests, the frequency of 36-composite ACT scores would be 704/1,623,112 (0.0434%) and the frequency of 800-average SAT scores would be about 738/1,647,123 (0.0448%). To me this would indicate top scores on either test should warrant about equal respect, especially given that the differences between all these top scores is well within margin of statistical significance for these tests. A difference in “prestige”, perceived respect, is probably due to regional biases.</p>