Rank the September 2013 ACT - Hard or Easy?

honeybee63
Wed, 16 Oct 2013 16:59:18 +0000

The essay portion is kind of ridiculous regardless. The readers have 2 minutes per essay, they read the first paragraph, skim the rest and assign a score. Truly exceptional writers can end up with a 9 or 10 (or lower) and really mediocre writers can earn an 11 or 12. My kids attend a small private school with an outstanding English department. If you saw the faculty resumes you really would think it was a college English department. Anyway, the AP Lit teacher, who publishes in literary journals every year, did an experiment where he somehow submitted his own essays for official scoring three years in a row and never earned above a 9! Your son can work on some basics to get his score up, but good colleges will judge his writing by his own essays not the ACT score (which is not averaged into the composite so don’t worry about that).