ACT Now Offers Superscore Reports
ACT superscore reporting just became available last month. With this feature students are able to easily send off their highest composite ACT scores to their colleges, which in most cases is a higher cumulative number and will present the student in a stronger light.
ACT.org has added an automatically calculated superscore visible on the home webpage to all students who have taken the ACT test more than once. A student must have scores from at least two test administrations for ACT to generate a superscore –the average of the four best subject scores (English, math, reading and science) across all ACT test sittings. See below, this student took the ACT twice, in April and in June and her highest scores make up the 28 composite.
Sending a superstore does not mean the college will accept it. For some colleges, the policy is only to look at the individual test date with the highest composite score. Compass Education Group offers a listing of colleges and their policies on superscoring: https://www.compassprep.com/superscore-and-score-choice/
College policies change frequently, so students should check individual college websites for the most recent information.
Prior to ACT’s superscore sending ability, students had to pay for and send multiple reports to each college. Now, they can send a superscore and all of its components in a single report – for $15. When students send a superscore, scores that make up the superscore are automatically sent as well as the single highest score test date. This is helpful because if a particular college doesn’t accept superscoring, the college will have the highest single score date from the student there as well.
Deciphering how best to send the scores can be tricky. Reports can be ordered from the Home page (ACT logo at top left) or the Scores page (top tab) of a student’s ACT portal. The two different ordering paths each have advantages and disadvantages. The Scores page is an easier point from which to send scores, but only allows students to see one set of scores at a time. The Home page allows a view of several scores at once but ordering scores from there is confusing. Students may want to learn their way around the portal by studying the Home page first and then moving on to the Scores page to order and send scores.
A couple of other aspects of the new function:
ACT doesn’t label the type of report in the shopping cart (single date or superscore). Students need to remember what they’ve chosen.
There is no option to mix-and-match report types or dates. If a student wants to send some colleges superscore reports and some colleges test date reports, they need to check out twice.
Free reports, the ones a student can order when they register for a test, aren’t superscore reports. They apply only to the test date for which the student is registering.
If a student sends a superscore to a school that supposedly does not look at the superscore, schools may look at all of the scores provided anyway. Students should research each school and come up with a plan to send each school ONLY the scores that represent the student the best.
If a student has taken the ACT Essay, that score is not included in calculating the superscore.
The reason ACT decided to offer superscoring now is research, said ACT researcher Krista Mattern, which shows that superscores are a more holistic way of looking at students and a better predictor of how students will do in college than other data points (most recent test score, average scores and highest composite score).