Matt Larriva
Jul 28, 2023
Home » Don’t Trust The Celebrity ACT Scores You See Online
Celebrity ACT scores are a sham. Well, at least of a lot of them that we see posted all over the internet.
The truth is, Marilyn Monroe never took the ACT.
Neither did William Faulkner or former United States President, Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ), though there are pages of search results lamenting the low ACT scores of each.
How did this curious rumor come to be, and what does it imply for today’s ACT test takers?
Table Of Contents
- Why do people care about the President's IQ?
- The ACT Scores Rumors Continue
- So, I Personally Asked Arp About His List
- What’s The Harm, Some May Ask?
Why do people care about the President’s IQ?
Having recently pondered a similar question, we scoured internet archives back five years to get to the bottom of people’s fascination with celebrity’ ACT and IQ scores.
SHOW ME CELEBRITY IQ SCORES
/searching-for-the-presidents-test-scores/
Where Did Rumors About Celebrity ACT Scores Start?
In 2013, Workman Publishing released an ACT prep book penned by Chris Arp et.al. In this 352-page tome entitled, Up Your Score: ACT, 2014-2015 Edition, the authors take a lighthearted approach to test prep, including such chapter titles as, “The Darkness: A Maelstrom of Fear,” followed by, “The Light: Studying Without Stress.”
But it’s the chapter entitled “The True Story of the ACT-bot” that seems to have seeded a rumor that is well into its fifth year, with no signs of exhaustion.
In this section, the authors introduce a narrative involving the fictitious ACT-bot: a robot who clawed his way from underground to fight the US military and evaluate the populous on its ability to perform on a standardized test.
The authors use this character as an antagonist in the book, and the device works.
It is clearly fiction…
But in the margin, abutting a line about an archeologist being vaporized by the robot, there lies a reference to ACT scores of famous Americans.
Among others, it claims:
- William Faulkner scored an 18 on the ACT
- Marilyn Monroe’s ACT score was a 21
- LBJ earned a score of 26 on his ACT
- and “That guy who narrates the trailers for disaster movies” scored a 23
Given the jocular tone of the section, the cohort of the list, or even a passing knowledge of history, one would almost certainly conclude that the report was in jest. Almost.
But 5 years ago, the reddit user Fekpol12 posted the above picture of the margin of the book, out of context with the title:
ACT Scores of Famous Americans
- John Cena: 20
- Steve Jobs: 32
- Barack Obama: 30
- Marilyn Monroe: 21
- Waka Flaka Flame: 34
And in the era of post-truth, a picture of a book’s margin, reposted on Reddit goes as truth.
Shortly thereafter, in February 2015, the image was found by a small but ambitious company named PrepScholar. Marketing themselves as, “the best college admissions consulting service in the world. Founded by Harvard grads….” the company posted on its Facebook page a link to an article explaining what celebrities achieved on their ACTs.
This list included Marilyn Monroe and LBJ, and is, to my searches, the first time either had their supposed ACT scores listed, outside of Arp’s farce.
The PrepScholar article contained no references for the celebrity ACT scores but was not posed as fiction. 🤔
In February 2016, Magoosh—who is ranked by Inc. magazine as one of the fastest-growing companies in the U.S.– published a version of the list.
Their list included two from Arp’s joke list: Marilyn Monroe and John Cena—the professional wrestler-cum-actor who Arp listed as scoring a 20 on his first ACT test attempt and a perfect 36 on his second try at the ACT.
In November 2017, PrepScholar updated the list, upgrading the content with pictures and some additional celebrity ACT scores. And while the author cited the Flickr account from where she got the photo of Marilyn Monroe, she opted not to cite any sources for the celebrity ACT scores.
The ACT Scores Rumors Continue
In November 2018, PrepExpert (the company launched to success by its appearance on SharkTank and subsequent funding by Mark Cuban) decided to make an infographic including three celebrity ACT test scores from Arp’s list:
- LBJ
- Monroe
- Faulkner
On that list of celebrity ACT scores, each celebrity was represented by a stylized artistic portrait. However, like the others before them, they provided no references.
Though they did give the memory of Faulkner a postmortem consolation for winning the Nobel Prize in literature despite his supposedly average ACT score: “Novelist William Faulkner scored an 18 on the ACT, not an incredibly impressive score overall. But consider his career – award-winning author, including the Nobel Prize for Literature.”
In February 2019, SupertutorTV repeated the scores of the trio (Monroe, LBJ, Faulkner).
While we give them a nod for being the first article in five years to cite a source, their source was PrepScholar, who as far as we can tell, sourced their information from Arp’s list.
Starting to see the trend? Because it isn’t over yet…
As recently as September 2019, the rumor lives on, with JumpStart Tutoring regurgitating the Monroe statistic.
What If Arp Was Right About The Celebrity ACT Scores?
But wait—what if Arp got it right?
What if his team did investigative research and uncovered the truth about celebrity ACT scores?
Stranger things have happened…
Never mind the fact that the ACT first debuted in November 1959, when Monroe was pushing 34 and busy receiving a Golden Globe forSome Like It Hot.
Suspend disbelief, and assume that in 1959, Faulkner, who had already received the Nobel Prize in Literature 10 years earlier, grew tired of writing. And ponder a world where, between receiving his two Pulitzer Prizes (1955 and 1963), he had writer’s block and wanted to sit down for a nice college entrance exam to get the creative juices flowing.
In this world where 30-something actors at the height of their careers take college entrance exams, and where Nobel Laureates take the ACT in their 50s, then certainly presidents would not be left out of the fun.
LBJ would have heard of the new craze sweeping the glitterati and would have had to have taken the exam.
Eisenhower, who had tasked Johnson (a senator at the time) with navigating peaceful space exploration, surely would have understood Johnson’s desire to take the ACT. Kennedy would have given Johnson some time to study in between campaign rallies, surely.
That could be.
So, I Personally Asked Arp About His List
At this point, what else is there to do than get to the bottom of the celebrity ACT score rumors.
So..
I reached out to Arp and asked if his section listing ACT scores was fiction or if he had sources.
Guess what?
He called me back in less than 12 hours and said cheerfully, “of course it was a joke…the list has Faulkner on it.”
Maybeall the republishing of the list could be forgivable if anyone had ever citedanything, so that the readers could audit the trustworthiness.
Ormaybe if Arps book was inaccessible, or if it were challenging to purchase acopy, then we could hand-waive the rumor.
But in 2014, Google Books indexed the 2013 edition of the book and included the section containing “scores” in its free preview.
Even those who wanted to cite the list without purchasing the book could have googled, scrolled to page 20 and found that in the margin, under the list of celebrity ACT scores is a colorful quote from one of the authors, “I only listen to audiobooks read by Taylor Lautner. If you listen closely enough, you can hear his abs contracting.” Certainly, that would have raised flags enough to not publish the list.
What’s The Harm, Some May Ask?
The republication by the major test prep companies was entertaining, and there was no harm done to the deceased.
Well, the libel aside (not Arp’s—which was clearly fiction), it does the same harm as the myth that Einstein failed math and was a bad student (Einstein was clearly talented from an early age, only failing an entrance exam which was given in French, not his native tongue).
The harm is that it violates reality to the detriment of those who believe it. It produces a sideways narrative wherein things that should be worrisome, are dismissed.
If you do poorly on tests, there is a chance that the education system is failing you and that your learning process requires special attention.
A response to a failure in math should not be to cite Einstein. A response to dropping out of college should not be a Steve Jobs reference. And a response to bad test scores should not be, “but so did LBJ and he became the president.”
— Matthew Larriva, founder, Powerful Prep
Education is not to be taken lightly, and its grading is not to be misrepresented—least of all by education companies that claim expertise in the matter.
All this to say nothing of the Faulkner, Johnson, and Mortenson (real name of Monroe) families, whose star members lackluster ACT “scores” are being reprinted to this day.
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