Participation rate has a huge impact on state average SAT / ACT scores. In any state, the top students on the SAT/ACT are those most eager to take it, so states with low participation rates have artificially higher SAT / ACT scores.  Here, we use advanced statistical methods to adjust for participation rate to get at the real ranking of states by their real SAT and ACT scores. 

At long last, you get your SAT or ACT scores back, and now you have to make an important decision—do you retake the test and aim for a higher score? What are your chances of improving your score?

The answer can get complicated, depending on how many times you've taken it before and what your score target is. Read on to develop the best testing plan for yourself.

Getting ready to apply to college? If you are, I’m sure you’ve heard of the ACT and/or SAT. If you’re unfamiliar with the basics of the ACT, make sure to learn about what the ACT is before continuing reading this article. Just how important is the ACT for your college applications? It is one of the most important pieces of your college application (if not THE most important piece).

In this guide, I'll explain why test scores are a key part of your application and how to determine the ACT admission requirements for your target schools.

It seems obvious that each ACT / SAT question must have exactly one answer, and this answer must be clearly and objectively correct. However, as we’ll explain below, that simple fact alone disqualifies vast swaths of reasonable questions that you otherwise see in everyday tests at school.  This obvious fact also leads to a little-known secret that, when applied correctly, guarantees the cracking of each question. You don’t have to trust me—read through this guide and ask any perfect or near-perfect scorer. They’ll agree on the secret.

Do you have great extracurriculars?  Maybe you’re captain of the football team or president of a top debate team.  Your approach to college admissions will be quite different than a typical student’s, and your SAT / ACT prep process should be uniquely tailored to you. In this article, we talk about what unique opportunities you have in test prep and what traps you should avoid.

Are you a college admissions officer or employer wondering how to use ACT scores to select the best applicants? Standardized test scores are often used to predict a person’s intelligence and probability of future success; however, many inferences that are based on ACT scores are often inaccurate.

Keep reading to learn what information ACT scores can tell you, what information they can’t tell you, and how to use them to your best advantage.

Here at PrepScholar, we get a lot of questions about every aspect of the ACT. To help, we've compiled this ACT FAQ to address all of your questions about the test – whether you haven’t even cracked open a prep book to study for it yet or if you’ve taken it four times and are wondering which scores to send to colleges.

Read on to get the answers to all of your burning ACT-related questions and links to the best articles on our site to help you prepare for the ACT.

Are you already scoring well on the SAT and getting a 1400 or above (2100 in the 2400 scale)?  This puts you in a special class, and your strategy for improving your SAT score will be very different from the average students'.  Having made the improvement myself, I'll show you how you can aim for a perfect SAT score too.

The ACT is daunting. It just is. One of the most intimidating things about it is the average student's initial uncertainty as to what types of questions are going to be asked: Will it test vocabulary? What's tested on the science section? How many formulas do I need to memorize? The best way to clear up the confusion is to look at some ACT sample questions, so you can get a sense of what to expect on test day.

As you are most likely aware, there are five sections on the ACT—English, Math, Reading, Science, and Writing—each of which has its own types of questions. In this article, I'll guide you through every type of question you're going to encounter in each of these areas and offer some tips on preparing for them.

If you took the ACT or are preparing for the ACT, you should understand score percentiles. Colleges use score percentiles as a way to compare students across the country and within each state. In this article, I’ll explain what an ACT Score Percentile is and how to use it in your ACT score planning. 

If you just took the ACT or if you took the ACT in 2008-2010, you might be curious as to how your percentile score compares to students with the same scaled score in other years? In this guide, I'll explain what percentiles are, how they work on the ACT, and why they matter (even the older ones). I'll also give you ACT percentile charts for 2011-2014, so you can see how your scores stack up against historical ones.

If you’ve found this guide, you're probably looking for a good high school, or you want to see how your high school measures up compared to others. When comparing high schools, a helpful metric is average ACT Score.

In this guide, I’ll tell you what average ACT score represents, why you should care about a school’s average ACT score, and where you can find information on average ACT scores by high school.

The college application process can be a long and difficult journey for high school students. Organizing your application materials well in advance and paying attention to deadlines is critical. You should also start researching colleges earlier rather than later so that you can account for each school's specific application requirements.

In this infographic, I've broken down the actions you need to take to be prepared for college applications starting at the beginning of your junior year through to your senior spring.

If you're doing well on the ACT but you still want to improve, it can be difficult to find the right prep strategies. High scorers who hope to become elite scorers will benefit from different study strategies than low scorers.

In this article, I'll go through what it means to be a high scorer on the ACT, why high scorers can benefit from their own set of preparation strategies, and which strategies will give you the best chance of improving already impressive test results.

Have you been falsely accused of cheating on the SAT or ACT? What can you do if you're accused of cheating at the test center? What can you do if you're accused of cheating after you get your score? How can you fight it if they have evidence against you? Will you not get into any colleges? What are the best and worst case scenarios? I'll answer all of these questions below.