So a 30 is in the 95th percentile in terms of ACT scores, which means that if someone gets a 30 then they score equal or higher than 95 percent of the people who took the test. Strangely on here, when I see people with similar scores, they’re viewed as “below average” and are told to try to “bump it up a few points.” I know that college confidential is like the top 1% of the top 1% of students, but this doesn’t make sense to me. How is a 95th percentile score not good enough for some places? Heck, even a 1260 on the SAT is in the 87th percentile nationally, but it’s considered a “terrible” score on here. Can someone please explain how these scores–scores that most kids at my school would be overjoyed to get–aren’t what could be classified as “good” to colleges?
It depends on what schools the student is targeting. As you noted, CC is skewed towards overachievers. A 30 is a great score and will give a student a good shot at admission to many wonderful colleges. It may, however, make some colleges, but not many in the larger landscape, very unlikely. Perspective is key.
The percentiles that matter are the percentiles of incoming freshmen at a particular college. Those can be found in the college’s CDS and on College Navigator. The scores you mention are not “bad” and would be good applicant scores at many, many colleges. College Confidential is biased toward “prestigious” and “highly ranked” institutions. Most people do not operate in that stratosphere.
Because all those 95th percentilers apply to the same 40-50 schools, and those schools mostly get applicants from this group. All the high achievers are chasing the same thing.
What is classified as “good” depends on who is doing the classifying. Its all subjective. Many students here are targeting very selective schools. For the tippy top colleges 95th percentile isn’t good enough unless you have other aspects of your application that are exceptional. But, most students is the larger world are not targeting these universities and so what is “good” can be quite a bit lower than what you need for selective schools. You should look up the common data set of the schools you are interested in (just google the school name plus common data set). You can find out what the range of scores were for students the school accepted in the prior year.