@ChangeTheGame 35 ACT is awesome. Especially his improvement. My kid got 33 ACT as a junior, and I felt that was good enough for him to apply to Stanford or to any of HYPS because his scores in Reading and Grammar were 35s, and his indicated interest area was non STEM. Actually, it was out hope our kid get into either UCLA or Berkeley; it was never our intention for our kid to apply to Stanford. I also knew perfect test scores don’t mean all that much to top colleges so 33 ACT was a job accomplished for us. The thing that surprised me very much was when he was able to do well enough to make NMF in CA when he took PSAT right after he took ACT. Basically his self prep for ACT helped him with his PSAT score more than ACT score. Based on my kid’s experience, I found it weird how kids who scored 1570s or 35+ in ACT did not get good enough scores in PSAT to become NMFs. To me personally, making NMF was more helpful than getting slightly higher scores in SAT or ACT due to full rides available to NMFs. I always have a little bit of wistful feeling of having passed up full rides. Researching full rides based on NMF status was what brought me to CC.