My daughter just got her ACT scores and did well with an English score of 32 and a Reading score of 35. Her writing sub-scores were all 9 which according to charts I could find puts it in the 95% national range. But her overall writing score is listed as a 26 which puts her in 83%. To me it looks like there might be an error. How can writing sub-scores of 9 become a total score of 26? Her ELA score is 31 which makes sense but that 26 on writing makes no sense to me. Anyway, hope someone can help shed some light on this. She is applying Early Decision November 1 and I am hoping to get this fixed.
Additionally this total score on just writing is new to this september exam. On the old june 2015 exam she took she got a writing score of 9 and also an English/Wriging socre.
Edited because I don’t think I answered the question.
I’d call the ACT people and ask for an explanation.
Thanks I tried to locate a phone number but the only one I can find in not in service and Live Chat is not picking up. I can write to them and pay the $50 to review the writing section but I’m not really asking anyone to check if the 9 my daughter got is accurate. I’m asking how that can ever turn into a 26. Also, if I do this by snail mail it will take about 5 weeks and for early decision everything has to be at the school by November 1 so there is no time for that. If by any chance you have a contact phone number for ACT customer service that would be great. The is phone number I came up with after I selected the “contact us by phone” option 319.337.1270. Doesn’t exist!
Got a hold of them - had to put a 1 in front of that number and it worked - my bad! Anyway it appears this test is scored differently than past tests. The sub-scores given on the writing part of this test are not equal to the score given on the writing part of the tests in the past. Lucky for my daughter that the writing part of the ACT is not included in the composite score of the ACT. I’m not sure why the writing score is that low as my daughter is usually an excellent writer but - oh well.
@bksmoms here’s a link to ACTs National Distribution of Cumulative percents. http://www.act.org/aap/pdf/NormsChartSTEMELAWriting-Web2015-16.pdf
Take a look at the last column, which is Writing. According to this chart, your daughter’s score of 26 is actually the equivalent of a 93%. Hope that makes her feel better:-)
Add together your subscores and multiply by 3/4. Your writing score range should be from two points below that calculation up to that calculation.
For your daughter, that range is 25-27, so her score makes sense.
Don’t worry the same thing happened to me; 36 on verbal stuff, and 29 writing. I believe it’s because they switched to scaled scores this year, and in the past 10-12 has always been like the top 5 percent, so they’re trying to adjust accordingly out of 36.