ACT examined the international competitiveness of college and career ready standards in the policy research report, Affirming the Goal: Is College and Career Readiness an Internationally Competitive Standard? In this study, ACT performed a linking analysis to identify the PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) scores in reading and mathematics that are equivalent to the college and career readiness benchmark scores on PLAN[R], ACT's tenth-grade college and career readiness assessment. These benchmark scores represent being on target for readiness. The linking analysis was based on 2,248 US tenth-grade students from 77 high schools across the US who tested under standardized conditions with both PLAN and a special administration of PISA. By linking the tenth-grade college and career readiness benchmarks to the PISA scale, ACT determined if the college and career readiness performance standards for US students in these two subjects was competitive with the performance of students in other countries. The linking analysis affirms that the performance standards of college and career readiness--and therefore the new Common Core State Standards--are competitive with the highest performing nations in the world. (Contains 2 figures.) [For the full report, "Affirming the Goal: Is College and Career Readiness an Internationally Competitive Standard?," see ED520009. For the advance brief, "Affirming the Goal: Is College and Career Readiness an Internationally Competitive Standard? Advance Brief for State Policymakers," see ED520013.]