<p>I hear pretty consistently that a 35 ACT will 'open doors' 'is amazing!' and 'is a huge bright spot on apps' etc.</p>
<p>My question: How does a 34 rate? I know that it is a very good score, but when applying to Ivies and the like, how good is it exactly? I.E. no longer 'elite' like a 35, but still good, or good enough to not be bad, or is it good enough to be a strong point? Hopefully this makes sense, I am just trying to get a qualitative assesment of this score.</p>
<p>thanks :)</p>
<p>A 34 is still good...low 1500s if memory serves. I don't think there is much difference admissionswise after you've broken the 34/1500 barrier.</p>
<p>An ACT score of 34 is equivalent to a score of 760/760/760 on the SAT. An ACT score of 35 is equivalent to a score of 780/780/780.</p>
<p>I don't have recent data on the distribution of SAT scores. However, in 1984 only 1 in 10,000 test takers (who went on to college) achieved a 780/780 combined score or above. This was a total of around 90 individuals out of a population of 960,000 that took the test for a single sitting. Even if the numbers have doubled to 1 in 5,000, this still means there are very few people achieving a 780/780 or 35 ACT or above.</p>
<p>P.S. In 1984, there were about 6 out of 10,000 achieving the 760/760 scores (of those going on to college) --equivalent to the 34 ACT number--so as you can see the numbers rise dramatically as you start to go down the curve.</p>
<p>For details see the following website: <a href="http://www.eskimo.com/%7Emiyaguch/megadata/fifthnorm.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.eskimo.com/~miyaguch/megadata/fifthnorm.html</a></p>
<p>Maybe someone else has much more recent data--I almost didn't post this since the data given here is so old.</p>
<p>You know, since Harvard claims that the 75% level of their admissions are at the 1580 level or higher, that means that at least 475 people are achieving the equivalent of a 35 ACT today (obviously many more than in 1984)--and this assumes that every one of them applied to Harvard (which seems a bit unlikely). Given this statistic, it would seem that the numbers of people getting the SAT 780/780 number--or 35 ACT has gone up by a factor of at least two and possibly three (you can't presume five since there are multiple sittings of the SAT), and therefore the ratio today is at least the 1 in 5,000 mentioned in my last post.</p>
<p>um... are you being serious? 34 is an awesome score.
I think a 35 on the ACTs is much easier to get than a 1560... i know 5 people from my school who have gotten 35.</p>