ACT to Allow Retakes of Parts of Exam

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October 9, 2019

Students wanting to retake the ACT will be able to focus on only certain parts, organizers of the college entrance exam have announced.

Starting in 2020, students can sit the exam again but take only individual parts; at the moment, a student can resit the exam but has to take the entire test again. To reflect this change, organizers have introduced a "superscore," a composite score of each time that a student has attempted a certain part of the exam. Officials said that they were making the change in part because of reports that students who retook the exam scored worse on subsequent sittings.

The current iteration of the ACT is a four-section exam administered in an overall time period of 3 hours 35 minutes. The sections and their durations are these:

  • English (45 minutes)
  • Math (60 minutes)
  • Reading (35 minutes)
  • Science (35 minutes)
All of those sections comprise multiple choice questions. In addition, students can take the Writing test, for which students are required to craft a short essay for for which the duration is 40 minutes. For each subject, a student gets a score from 1 to 36; an additional score called the subscore is a composite of the required four sections. A score of 2 to 12 covers the Writing test.

The ACT first appeared in 1959 and was known as American College Testing. The original subjects were English, Math, Natural Sciences, and Social Studies. Changes in 1989 were to rename the Natural Sciences as Science Reasoning and to replace Social Studies with Reading. The optional Writing section appeared in 2005. Officials introduced a computerized version of the ACT in 2017.

Currently, a student pays $52 to take the four-section ACT and $68 to add the optional Writing test. Exam organizers have yet to announce the fee for retaking a section of the test.

The ACT is one of the two most popular college entrance exams in the U.S. The other is the SAT.

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Social Studies for Kids
copyright 2002–2023
David White

Social Studies for Kids
copyright 2002–2024
David White