The ACT for years has been the preferred test of most Midwest schools. Starting in September of 2020 ACT will make a drastic shift in the rules. Superscoringhas always been the choice of the college, but these new rules will make superscoring the preferred method of scoring for the ACT.

The ACT will now be scored using the superscore method, the combining of all of the best scores from each section of the overall test. This rule change will also give students the ability to only take certain sections of the test to improve their overall superscore.

The ACT’s goal in doing this is simple to compete with the SAT. The SAT has for a while been a superscored test. This provided a titanic advantage to students who took the SAT as opposed to the ACT. Colleges were now starting to take both the ACT and SAT, which gave students the opportunity to take the SAT and still get to just about any college they would like to.

This change also comes off the heels of the free ACT that was offered last winter. All of these new changes are to keep competition steep between the ACT and SAT.

These changes will also help to improve overall test scores. Students now only have to take certain sections of the test to improve their score instead of the whole test. Students no longer have to study for 4 different sections all at once. They can now just focus on improving one score on one section instead of taking the whole thing all over again.

The only downside to this is that the overall requirements for colleges will likely go up to gain admittance and scholarships for that school. Superscoring will mean higher scores all around which means colleges would have to adjust their requirements to fit these new high scores.

The new rules are a great improvement to the overall tests and will hopefully make the test quite a bit less stressful on students.