Need To Know: Preparing Your Student for the ACTs
After months of preparation and plenty of nail-biting, local high school students will have Scantron sheets on the brain as they sit down this week to take the Michigan Merit Exam (MME), the ACT and the WorkKeys job skills and assessment test.
“In general, Birmingham High School students want to go to top colleges,” said Rebecca Goldberg, a seventh-grade teacher at Berkshire Middle School and founder of Michigan Test Prep, an ACT preparatory course. “And the kids all know the score they need to be considered for admission to those schools.”
To get those top scores, Michigan students will be sitting down to three days of testing Tuesday through Thursday, during which they will take the three tests, all administered by the Michigan Department of Education.
While the MME and WorkKeys tests are used to assess college readiness, the ACT is a college preparation exam, the scores of which will be sent to colleges and universities across the country and will be used to help determine which students are admitted to college.
With the ACT, students have more than one chance to earn a higher score. Students may begin retaking the test April 9, when it’s offered nationally. And for students looking to boost their scores, there’s no shortage of local training centers.
Reaching for the top
According to the National Center for Educational Statistics, composite ACT scores required by the eight Ivy League schools — Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania and Yale — ranged from 29 to 34 in 2008. A perfect score on the ACT, achieved by less than one-tenth of 1 percent of test-takers, is a 36.
Scores required by Michigan schools vary. For the middle 50th percentile of students accepted in 2010 — that is, students with scores in middle half, or from the 25th through the 75th percentiles — the average ACT scores for entering these schools were:
* University of Michigan: 28-32.
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