Act is not curved!!!

BronxSci
Fri, 30 Oct 2009 15:48:56 +0000

THIS IS FROM A PRIOR POST ON CC AND GIVES NICE DESCRIPTION OF “CURVE” ISSUE

03-25-2007, 11:54 AM #2
drusba
Senior Member

Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: Chicago
Posts: 3,246

An ACT curve is a misconception. ACT has numerous exams that were developed over years and exams now are likely to be the same as ones given in the past with minor changes at most. When you go in to take an exam, the score you will get based on number answered correctly is pre-determined and does not depend on what the particular testing group for that exam does as a whole (based on long experience with the exam, they know going in that absent genetic re-engineering of high school students as a whole, the range of scores they are going to get will be somewhat close to what they got before on that exam). How many correct are needed to get a certain score in a subsection may vary somewhat from exam to exam (and thus knowing what happened on the last exam that was just given does not really help because the next exam given will be a different one having its own historically created pre-determined scores); for example, there are some exams where getting one wrong in science automatically drops you to a 34 rather than a 35 in that section. Also, all questions have the same weight, i.e., getting a hard question correct carries no more points than getting an easy question correct. A rule of thumb once given by the ACT is that getting 90% correct in any given section will likely put you in the 30 to 31 score range for that section. Since the science and reading sections have only 40 questions each, you only need to miss 4 on each to fall to that 90% correct range. English has 75 and math has 60 questions and thus you can miss more questions and still be in that 90% range.