The dense, dry passages found in the ACT’s reading section, whether from fiction, the humanities, or the natural sciences, can leave even the most confident readers questioning their comprehension and analysis skills. And that’s before you factor in your race against the clock, as you strive to answer 40 questions in just 35 minutes.
To ease your angst on exam day, you want to be sure that you have a clear understanding of the reading section—including its structure, scoring, and content.
Reading is the third section of the ACT, administered right after a break. This is great timing, since you’ll already be in the testing frame of mind, and after your break, should be feeling refreshed, focused, and ready to show your knowledge. Hopefully, you’ve had a snack and some water and returned to the test prepared to hit the ground running.
As noted above, the reading section of the ACT contains 40 questions, which you must answer in 35 minutes. You may think that gives you about 50 seconds per question, but in reality you’ll have significantly less time than that, since that doesn’t account for the time you need to spend reading the passages in this section.
The reading section has three standalone passages and one set of two shorter passages. Each passage is between 700 and 1,000 words long (in the case of the paired passages, they will total 1,000 words), and is designed to reflect the difficulty and style you’d encounter in a first-year college course. After each passage, you’ll need to answer 10 questions about its content.
The passages cover a broad range of fields and no pre-existing knowledge is assumed—everything you need to know to answer the questions is found directly in the text. The questions are designed specifically to test your reading comprehension and critical reading skills, not your knowledge of the topic a passage is about, or the novel it comes from.
Each passage includes a brief introduction, which is usually between one and three sentences long. Although you might be tempted to save some precious time by skipping these introductions and getting right to the body of the text, doing so is actually counterproductive.
The introductions often contain critical information about the passage, such as historical context or specific vocabulary terms, or provide a useful overview of what the main points are, which can be an invaluable reference point as you answer the questions. Make sure to always at least skim them.
Finally, keep in mind that the passages are not presented in any specific order, and you are not required to complete them in the sequence they appear. Skipping ahead to read an easier passage first is fine, and is often part of a smart time-management plan.
While the reading section has 40 questions, your score will not be out of 40. Instead, your raw score—the number of questions you answered correctly—is converted into a scaled score, between 1-36. This is the number you receive on your score report, and the one that averages into your composite ACT score.
However, the ACT scale is not a curve . Your score has nothing to do with the scores received by other people who took the same test as you. Rather, scaling accounts for the difficulty of the particular test you took compared to other versions of the ACT.
Although no ACT is designed to be harder or easier, some variation is inevitable. The test makers use scaling to ensure that a specific score always reflects the same level of mastery.
Below is an example of how the number of correct answers on the reading section of the ACT translates into a scaled score. Note that this scale is from a particular practice ACT, and the exact numbers may vary slightly from one test to another.
Scaled Score
Questions Answered Correctly