Colleges and universities admit candidates along a range of test scores, though the band is narrower at more selective universities. The truth is that it’s difficult to give a hard-and-fast rule in regard to the absolute minimum ACT score for college. Mime school only accepts your test scores if you can silently act them out. Specialized schools like art schools and music conservatories also often have lower standardized test requirements, as a student’s creative work is the primary criteria used for admission. You might still need to submit test scores for these schools, but they won’t keep you from being admitted. For instance, publicly funded Texas universities generally guarantee admission to those in the top 10% of their graduating high school class, although some have lowered this cap to the top 7% in recent years. In fact, public universities typically have special admissions criteria for residents that allow or compensate for lower standardized test scores. Smaller state schools local to you often accept scores in the 18-22 range.
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By contrast, you might still have a shot at a selective public school like the University of Illinois with a score around 26-27. If you’re aiming for an elite institution like the University of Chicago or Princeton, you’ll need to score at least 31-32, and that would be on the low end for both these schools. The answer to this question is that it depends-primarily on what colleges you're applying to, but also to a certain extent on your other qualifications.įor more selective schools, you’ll need a high ACT score to have a decent chance of getting in. Since it’s pretty unlikely for you to get the minimum ACT score, you might be more interested in knowing this: what's the lowest possible ACT score you could get that would still ensure you have a shot at getting into college? What’s the Lowest ACT Score You Can Have for College? Therefore, it is highly unlikely that you will get the lowest possible score-or even a score lower than 11-on the ACT. Even if you guessed on every question, you’d get a composite score of around 11-13. To give you an idea of how rare a score of 1 actually is, a composite score ranging anywhere from 1 to 11 would put you in the 1st percentile-meaning 99% of test takers scored higher than 101.įor individual sections, 99% of test takers scored higher than 8 in English, 12 in Math, 9 in Reading, and 9 in Science. Meanwhile, the 75th percentile means you scored better than 75% of test takers. This means that if you got 16, you'd have scored the same as or better than 25% of all test takers.
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The 25th percentile score is 16, and the 75th percentile score is 24. To get a composite score of 1, you would have to get either 1 on each section or three 1s and a 2. This composite score is calculated by taking the average of all four section scores (English, Math, Reading, and Science) and rounding (so anything ending with a. The ACT is scored on a scale of 1-36, meaning that the absolute minimum ACT score you could get is 1.
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#WHATS THE LOWEST SCORE ON THE ACT HOW TO#
We'll then discuss the minimum ACT score for college admissions, how to choose colleges based on your score (whatever it might be), how to set an ACT target score based on your colleges, and what you can do if you think your ACT score is too low for your desired schools. In this article, we'll break down the lowest possible ACT score and explain why you’re not likely to actually get it. What’s the worst ACT score you could get? What’s the worst score you could get and still have a shot at getting into your dream program? If you’re taking the ACT, then you might be worried about how you’ll do on it. There are tons of numbers associated with college applications: GPA, class rank, standardized test scores, maybe some AP tests.