Good luck, I think you should focus the whole process more towards UW-Madison, it’s a great school, I love it, it’s fun, so many people (SO many). The environment is not boring at all. I will be Junior here at UW-Madison. I remember when I had to go through what you are. It’s tough, it’s sometimes frustrating but it will come to an end and you will be calm once you know where you will be attending.

But whatever you end up doing you will enjoy it.

Just looking at UW-Madison’s website, most of their students are in the 26-30 ACT range, so it’s true that you’re already on the top, with your score and good GPA. But I don’t see anything there about early admission, so I don’t think it would be too much of a problem if you put off applying to take it again. Make sure that’s with the writing section, though, because it looks like they require that.

I can’t find the numbers for Minnesota.

I do know that the colleges I was applying to gave out more scholarship money the higher your ACT score, so you’d have to poke around the respective websites for those schools to see if they do anything like that.

Good luck!

That said, taking the ACT in October will probably be unnecessary because you’ve already exceeded or met (at the upper range) the mid-50% range of ACT scores for both scores. So your ACT is certainly not going to hurt your chances of getting in if it stays at a 30.