These are numbers provided by the schools districts. Out here in CO, all HS students take the ACT as part of NCLB Act.
Every year there’s media stories about all the kids from the Cherry Creek and Boulder Valley School districts who got 36 scores. My kid’s small charter HS (150 kids per class) in BVSD has 1 or 2 36s every year.
If we are going to get precise about this, I would only take College Board’s word for the number of 1600 scorers (not Prepscholar’s estimate based on percentiles from the old test). I do not believe College Board has announced the number of 1600 scorers since the 2016 redesign nor sufficient percentile detail on the new test to compute that number. (I would be interested to see verifiable information, if it’s out there. I do not believe it is.)
I think the statisticians do their best. So if it’s not 2700. Is it 5 times more. 13000? Not statistically reasonable imho. But even so out of 2mm, is that not rare? I do.
Info direct from ACT.org. Colorado last year had an average ACT was 23.9. National average was 25. 36 is just not that common. Or a lot of students who in Colorado are scoring at the lowest level possible in great numbers.
23.9 and 25 averages don’t seem like the curve has many in the right tail in the high 30s. Unless there’s not a normal distribution. I’m sure @ucbalumnus or @Data10 can help us sort out the math.
The point of the recentering of the SAT curves is not so much that there are a lot of perfect scorers as there are many, many more scores in the elite university range.
See page 3 of the above report.
Original verbal scores 730 and higher all became 800 overnight in 1995.
Original verbal scores of 640 became 700.
This made people indistinguishable who previously were clearly distinguishable. Prior to 1995, a 750-800 verbal score was very, very rare, and people who had such scores coupled with a similar math scores got very large admissions boost. Afterward, not as much because they had so much company.
The popularity of the ACT is a relatively recent development.
My two sources ACT.org and not as authoritatively through prep scholar for SAT.
19750 students scored a 1500 or better.
The number I used of 50,000 was the 36,000 roughly from act (see below) and 19000 from sat. Rounding down for double counting.
But it’s an incredibly small group on a population and percentage basis. It’s an accomplishment.
And the 48,000 seats was calculated by anther poster. All schools with Less than 30 percent admissions rates.
It seems right enough for the basic point. Perfect scores are rare.
High scores defined as 1500 or above or 34+ is a really small group compared to the whole pool. But the total population and applicants has doubled over the years.
But with only so many seats and so many great kids. You can see why there is so much disappointment.
Twice as many applicants as in 1980 and approx same number of seats. It’s a math problem not a process or test prep problem. Imho.
Score # of Students Percentage of All Test Takers
36 3,741 0.195%
35 14,928 0.780%
34 21,836 1.140%
33 26,930 1.406%
Source: ACT.org
That’s because every Colorado 11th grader takes the ACT as the NCLB exam - even those who have only had English as a second language, or been in school for a year or two, or have learning disabilities and haven’t been slated for an individual test. One of the best schools in Denver is really a ‘half and half’ school with half the kids competing for schools like Stanford and the other half trying to stay out of jail. It wouldn’t surprise me if the ACT average was about 23-24 with half having scores above 30 and half having scores below 20. If the ACT wasn’t required as the NCLB exam, most of the second group would not take the ACT at all as they aren’t going to college.
It reminds me to feel blessed/lucky our kids are fighting it out for these schools and these types of concerns. It’s a fragment of society based on my experience and your info.
If 36 in ACT equates to one out of thousand (2000 out of 2 million), I had one out of 1000 percentile in SAT long time ago. Not that hard if you study, and I had learned English for 6 years at the time I took the test. And I had 3.0 GPA in high school. Of course, the only reason I studied for SAT on my own was because in HS junior year, someone told me I had no chance to get into good college with 3.0 gpa in high school, so I knew only chance I had to get into good college was to kick butt in SAT and write great essays. And I got into an Ivy where I proceeded to get 2.9 GPA, and then after which I got into a top 5 law school with very good LSAT, great essays and a great recommendation letter from a public defender I interned for. And of course, my law school gpa was 2.9 also. I had so many people, including teachers and other kids, who were mad at me for getting into good schools with lousy grades and skipping classes.
@websensation Congrats on your remarkable success. You must be incredibly gifted which is not as informative for the rest of us. A 36 is one in a thousand. If the average graduating class is 250 students and half the college bound student take the ACT. Let’s use 100 net test takers as usable guess. That is one 36 for every 10 high schools. It’s probably less because there are 37000 high schools which would indicate 3700 perfect scores. So it is rare. You did it so it feels easier to you.
But the 3.0 high school student with. 36 act today getting into an Ivy unhooked is essentially “zero”.
You probably don’t get into a top 20 public uni. Nearly no chance at the t 20 lacs or top 50 unis. There’s a whole thread about high score low gpa results here. And low gpa is more like 3.5 mismatch. Not 3.0. No wake forest university of Florida or William and Mary with that profile. Forget the Ivy League.
Getting a 36 is hard. Your story happening today without some other connection is one out of 2.3mm or the entire college applicant pool. And the 2.9 without something else involved with a super high mcat is not getting into many top 20 Law programs either.
This is a fallacy that many people fall into and it is quite frustrating. You believe that because you were able to do something, everyone should be able to do it. By saying its “not hard” you devalue the effort of everyone else who works hard and doesn’t achieve the same results as you. It was not hard for you, because you have a gift in that area. I used to think public speaking was easy because it was easy for me. If you just prepare a bit, you should be able to walk onto a stage in front of hundreds of people and speak easily. It took me a long time to realize that I had a gift that others did not have. When I took the SAT decades ago, I thought the English section was easy. How could anyone not get a perfect score on those simple analogies? They were so easy! I thought that, because if felt easy to me.
We all have different gifts. Its helpful to remember that the things that seem easy to us are actually talents to be grateful for and not reasons to judge the effort of others.
Very true! I used to feel that other kids weren’t doing well in math because they weren’t trying, because I found it easy to make As with some study. Finally, I had an epiphany in high school when I realized their struggle was the same as mine in PE, when a teacher accused me of not trying in gymnastics. She had no idea how hard I was trying!
Saying that it is “not hard” to get a 36 ACT is as valid as saying it is “not hard” to get a 4.0 GPA. Obviously, getting a 4.0 is perfectly achievable and some students do it and I am certain a few of them believe it is not very hard to get a 4.0 with a little studying. But it was apparently “hard” for the person who got a 36 on their ACT but struggled to get a 3.0 in high school, college or law school.
What is interesting today is that colleges seem to respect very high GPAs more than very high standardized test scores. And seem less forgiving of low GPAs now.
Probably because HS GPAs are accumulated over a longer time of study covering a more diverse set of academic tasks than SAT or ACT scores, and are better predictors of college GPA than SAT or ACT scores.
Nope. The masses could be given unlimited time to study and prepare and they could never clear 33. Never. The masses just don’t have the innate [brain] processing power.
(i’m guessing that you have a top 5% IQ, web. Perhaps 132+?)
I’m not reading through 232 pages of comments on this thread, so if this has been said before, forgive the reiteration.
The college scam “Varsity Blues” was not an isolated situation. This scam was brought to light because financial fraudster, Morrie Tobin, offered up a tip to the FBI in an attempt to get leniency, a plea deal if you will. These scams continue to happen all over. The other people involved just haven’t been caught yet.
Take my graduating class this year. One of the students in my class was admitted to 5 Ivies. This girl is by no means an “Olivia Jade” airhead. She’s a good student with decent grades and average extracurriculars. That being said, she is by no means so far above average so as to merit acceptance into 5 Ivies, including Harvard. The differentiating factor? Her family consists of billionaires. Yes, you read that right, billionaires. They are into finance investment and even have their own bank. Again, while this girl is not a bad student, by any far stretch of the imagination, she’s certainly not the top student in our class. That goes to a classmate of ours who took AP Calculus BC in 8th grade! Yes, that’s right. He has a perfect GPA and a perfect SAT score (1600). He also has extremely impressive extracurriculars plus research and a publication in a peer-reviewed journal (before even graduating from high school). And yet, HE was waitlisted at Harvard, while the girl who got into the 5 Ivies was accepted to Harvard and 4 others. My school doesn’t rank students and we don’t have a valedictorian, but if we did, it would most definitely be him. Hands down! Yet, he comes from a middle-class income family that had to check the box regarding needing financial assistance. The girl who got into the 5 Ivies, didn’t need to do that.