Updated December 16, 2025

How to Get a Perfect ACT Score

Bonus Material: PrepMaven’s ACT Score Ranges for 750+ Schools

If you’re applying to selective colleges, you’re aiming to do as well as possible on the ACT.

If you’re aiming for a perfect score of 36, what does it take to get it?

In this post, we’ll share our insights on how to get a perfect 36 ACT score, how many questions you can miss if you want a top score, and how much a perfect score really matters.

We’ve been working with ACT students across the score spectrum for over two decades, and many of our tutors achieved perfect scores on the ACT themselves. Our students often see their scores go up by several points over just a few months of tutoring.

Whether you’re aiming to hit a college readiness benchmark or to be competitive in Ivy admissions, a good tutor will be able to help you tailor your prep plan to your goals.

And if you want to see what it takes to be competitive at your ideal college, take a look at our free resource below: it shows the median and 25th and 75th percentile ACT scores for more than 750 schools. Find the schools on your list to see how high you should be aiming!

Jump to section:
How rare are perfect ACT scores?
How the ACT is scored (and how it’s changing)
Can you make mistakes and still get a perfect score?
Does a perfect score make a difference?
How to prep for a perfect score
• Perfect your knowledge of the content
• Practice with the best tools
• Choose the ACT you take
• Master time management
• Eliminate silly mistakes
Next steps

How Rare are Perfect ACT Scores?

Just how rare is it to achieve a perfect score on the ACT?

Here’s the official percentile ranking data for the top ten possible ACT scores, the 27-36 score range. This shows what percentage of high school graduates in the classes of 2022, 2023, and 2024 who took the ACT achieved each score. (You can download the full table here.)

The percentage of students who achieved each score as their overall ACT score is in the “Composite” column, after the percentiles for the section scores.

Source: act.org

Even these top 10 scores are pretty rare. A composite score of 30 – several points off a perfect score – will already put you in the 95th percentile.

And a 34 or 35 is enough to put you in the 99th percentile of all test-takers, meaning you’re in the top 1%.

How the ACT is scored

The ACT has five sections — three required and two optional. Math, English, and Reading are required for all test-takers. The Science and Writing sections are optional.

To learn more about each section and what types of questions you can expect, check out our comprehensive posts about each section of the test:

Each of the three required ACT sections is scored on a 1-36 scale.

The composite score – your overall ACT score – is the average score of all the required sections of the test. To find your composite score, add up your three section scores and then divide the total by 3. (Don’t include the Science or Writing sections, if you took them.)

The composite test score is always a whole number, with scoring in 1-point increments. That means that rounding can work to your advantage: you don’t need to have a perfect 36 on each section to get a 36 overall.

Of course, it’s still good to aim for a high score on each section, since your score report will show your section scores. Our post on your ACT score report explains exactly what colleges will see, and how they’ll read your score report.

But if you’re not hitting a perfect score on some sections, you can mask them by doing better on other parts of the test. Here’s an example:

Section	Score
Reading	36
Math	36
English	35
Composite score	(36 + 36 + 35) / 3 = 35.7 → 36

Here’s how you can achieve a perfect score goal:

By getting a 36 on every section (obviously!)
By getting a 36 on any two sections and a 35 on any one section

If you get a 34 on any required section of the test, you unfortunately won’t reach a 36 composite score.

How the composite score has changed on the new ACT

Unlike on the old version of the ACT, on the new ACT, the Science score is no longer included in the composite score.

That might be a relief if Science is your weakest subject, or it could be bad news if you were counting on using a strong Science score to mask weaker areas.

You can still choose to take the Science section, and if you do, colleges will be able to see that score, as well as a STEM score that includes your Science and Math section scores.

The good news is that until spring 2026, you can often choose what version of the ACT you want to take – and that can work to your advantage when it comes to getting a perfect score. More on that later.

Can You Make Mistakes and Still Get a Perfect Score?

The short answer: yes, you can get questions wrong on the ACT and still get a 36.

The longer answer: the exact number of wrong answers you can give while still getting a 36 depends on which questions they are. If you make lots of mistakes in one section and get a 34 or lower, then no matter how well you did on everything else, you won’t get a perfect score.

But if you make one or two mistakes in each section, you’ll probably still have a good shot at a 36 overall.

Take a look at the top end of this scoring scale for converting your raw score – your number of correct answers – into a 1-36 scale score. (The exact score conversion will depend on the day that you take the test, but this example – which is used for the free ACT practice test you can download on the official ACT website – gives you an idea.)

Scaled section score	Raw English score	Raw Math score	Raw Reading score
36	40	40-41	27
35	38-39	39	26

(You might notice that the maximum number of correct answers isn’t the same as the number of questions on each section: there are 50 questions on ACT English, but the maximum raw score is 40. That’s because the ACT includes “field test” questions that don’t count towards your score. You don’t really need to worry about these, but if you’re curious, you can learn more about field test questions in our post about the new ACT.)

Depending on which section you’re looking at, you can get 1-2 questions wrong and still get a scale score of 36 on that section.

And since you don’t need a 36 on each individual section to get a perfect score overall, you can actually miss even more questions than this. Here’s what that might look like:

Section	Incorrect answers	Correct answers (raw score)	Scale score
Reading	0	27	36
Math	1	40	36
English	2	438	35
Composite score	–	–	(36 + 36 + 35) / 3 = 35.7 → 36

This imaginary student got very lucky, though – they scraped a perfect score by getting the absolute minimum number of questions correct. That’s not where you want to be if you’re serious about getting a 36, since the score scale can fluctuate from test to test.

Does a Perfect Score Make a Difference?

A score above 30 is already in the 95th percentile. So is it really worth putting in the effort to get a perfect 36?

It depends on your goals. Improving your ACT score can give you a boost in qualifying for merit aid at some colleges. But it can also make a big difference on your college application itself.

To see what ACT score you should be aiming for, find your top choice school in our free download showing the ACT score ranges for admitted students at more than 750 colleges and universities.

There’s not a single school – not even among the most competitive colleges – where the 50th percentile score for accepted students is a 36.

At a tiny handful of the most competitive colleges, a 36 is the 75th percentile score. That means around a quarter of the accepted applicants had a 36, and about three-quarters had a lower score.

So even if you’re applying to a highly competitive school, a 36 on the ACT is an above-average score. It means that, in at least one way, your college application will already stand out.

Unfortunately, there are just no guarantees in the college admissions process. You could be in the top score range and still face a rejection. But an above-average score on a standardized test, whatever “above average” means at the specific schools you’re applying to, can only improve your admissions chances.

You can also use superscoring to your advantage. Superscoring means that colleges look at your highest section score from each time you took the ACT.

Superscoring can be confusing, so we’ve broken down exactly how it works here, including how you can use it to achieve a “perfect” score.

How to Prep for a Perfect ACT Score

If you’re consistently scoring in the top range on practice tests, you might be feeling stuck on how to close the gap with your target score. Going from a 34 or 35 to a 36 is often harder than making the same score increase lower down the scale.

So how do you do it?

Perfect your knowledge of the test content

This might seem like a no-brainer, but when one or two missed questions can make the difference between a perfect score and one that has room for improvement, every question counts.

When you do practice questions, keep track of every question you get wrong and what type of question it was. Redo your missed questions regularly and make sure you understand the answer explanation.

If you notice that you’re missing a lot of questions within the same topic, it’s time to hit the books and brush up on your content knowledge. But even if it’s a one-off, taking the time to understand exactly what went wrong will set you up to get a similar question right the next time.

Practice with the best tools

Would you train for Olympic swimming in the kiddie pool? You could, but you probably wouldn’t get very far.

The same is true for your test prep plan.

Select your study materials critically. Before you choose a prep book, do your research: are the questions representative of what’s on the real test? We’ve researched a couple dozen of the top ACT prep books available, and we lined up the 11 best ones we found in this post.

But every student is different, and what works for someone else might not address your personal weak spots or work for your learning style – so take a look for yourself. (And before you rush to buy a stack of books, check your school or local library, which might have what you’re looking for.)

The one hard-and-fast rule is to make sure that your prep materials include official practice questions from the folks who make the ACT. Those will be the most realistic indicator of what you’ll see on the test. Some of their resources are available online for free, and others are collected in their official prep guide.

Choose the ACT you take

This strategy is a unique opportunity for students taking the ACT before spring 2026, while the new version of the test is being phased in.

On the current ACT, the Science section is one of the four factors that make up your composite score. But on the new ACT, Science will become optional, and even if you choose to take it, it will not be included in your composite score.

At this point, any students taking the ACT on a Saturday will get the new test. But those doing school-day testing will still see the old ACT — where the Science section will be included in their composite score — until this spring.

So play to your strengths.

Not great at science? Consider signing up for a Saturday test date. Want to use your science skills to make up for lower scores in another section? You might want to choose school-day testing in the next few months, before the old ACT is completely phased out.

Make your time management plan

The ACT’s strict time limits are famously tricky to navigate. If you want to hit your goal score and you don’t have gaps in your content knowledge, then time management is the place to focus your attention.

Not only does this help make sure that you won’t have questions left unanswered when time is called, it also gives you time to check your work for mistakes.

A good benchmark is to aim to finish each section with 15% of the time remaining. That sounds like a lot, but on test day, when you might be feeling nervous, you’ll probably need more time than you’re used to. Building in a buffer helps make sure that you won’t be caught off guard.

To use your time efficiently, you’ll want to brush up on your test-taking strategies. The most important way to do that is by taking enough timed practice tests and doing additional practice questions that will help you get familiar with the ins and outs of the ACT.

Eliminate “silly” mistakes

Everyone makes careless mistakes sometimes, and it can be tempting to brush those off when they happen on your practice tests: next time, you’ll definitely remember to read the whole question or do the last step of the math problem.

The problem is that “silly” mistakes will cost you just as many points as “real” mistakes.

If you’re losing points on careless mistakes, it’s time to figure out your personal strategy for avoiding them.

If you often misread questions, start underlining or circling the key words and rephrase what you’re being asked for before you start answering.
If you tend to skip steps on math problems, plug your answer back into the question and make sure it works. Even better, write out your work so you can see each step.
If you just know that certain types of questions are always challenging for you, circle those questions and make sure they’re the first ones you come back to check at the end of the section. If you’re in a time crunch, do the other questions first and save these for last.

If you’re still having trouble getting up to your goal ACT score, you might consider test-prep tutoring. An experienced tutor can help you make your test prep plan and master tricky ACT content, as well as learn valuable test-taking strategies. Give us a call for a free consultation on whether tutoring could be a good option for you.

Next Steps

Perfect ACT scores are extremely rare. Under 1% of all composite ACT scores are a perfect 36. But if that’s your goal, it’s achievable with enough time, discipline, and the right approach.

Below, we have a collection of posts covering a broad range of key strategies to help you prepare for the ACT.

These are a great starting point. But if you’re looking for support to take your score to the next level, individual tutoring can make a big difference.

Learn more about our programs here, and get in touch with our team for a free consultation on the right option for you.

And if you’re wondering what ACT score you really need to stand out in the college application process, check out our free resource below. It shows the median ACT scores for more than 750 schools, so you can find the colleges on your list and set your goal score to match.

How to Get a Perfect ACT Score

How to Get a Perfect ACT Score

How Rare are Perfect ACT Scores?

How the ACT is scored

How the composite score has changed on the new ACT

Can You Make Mistakes and Still Get a Perfect Score?

Does a Perfect Score Make a Difference?

How to Prep for a Perfect ACT Score

Next Steps

Related ACT Posts