Testing
Recently, a parent reached out with a concern that many families share. Her son had taken the ACT and, to put it mildly, it didn't go well. He struggled with test anxiety, which prevented him from finishing most sections. Before you consider canceling a score after an experience like this, it's important to understand how these tests are actually scored—because the final scores don't always match what the student experienced on test day.
The SAT and ACT are not scored on a curve comparing all test takers on a given day. A student who scores 1300 on the SAT would receive that same score whether they tested alongside a room full of toddlers or MIT professors. This principle—called equating—is what makes these tests "standardized." A 1300 always means the same thing, regardless of test date, test form, or who else is in the room.
Here's what does matter: the difficulty of the specific test form you receive.
If a test feels objectively harder to most students, they can miss more questions and still achieve a strong score. On a particularly difficult math section, for example, a student might earn a perfect score even with one or two questions wrong. But on an easier test, each incorrect answer results in a steeper penalty.
Imagine you're enrolled in two AP Calculus classes simultaneously. Class One has you and 19 MIT math professors. Class Two has you and 19 fourth graders. Both classes take an identical test that will be graded on a curve, and you can only take it once.
What happens? You'd likely get an F in the MIT class and an A+ in the fourth grade class—not because your calculus knowledge changed, but because a curved test measures your performance relative to other students. That's not standardized.
The SAT and ACT don't work this way. Your score in both hypothetical classes would be identical because these tests measure your mastery of the material, period.
Understanding the scoring system can help manage test-day anxiety:
If the test feels hard: Stick with it. Hard tests have forgiving scales, so missing a few questions—or not finishing a section—might not be the disaster it feels like. Focus on doing your best on the questions you can handle, and you may be pleasantly surprised when scores arrive.
I saw this play out with one student who was in tears after the math section because she had to guess on the last 10 questions. She was aiming for a high score and convinced she'd fallen short. Her anxiety carried into the reading and science sections, affecting her focus. When scores came back, she had indeed missed more math questions than expected—but so had everyone else. Her math score was a 32! Had she maintained her composure through the remaining sections, she likely would have hit her goal score. Instead, those sections brought down her composite.
