Let’s Get Tactical: What do you need to know about the new ACT?

ACT rolled out a digital version of it’s enhanced exam last spring. Earlier this month, we saw the paper version of that exam. Let’s talk about what you need to know!

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Transcript

Sheila Akbar: 0:00

I really, I want you to see this as a turf war between the ACT and the SAT. And it's not turf in terms of, you know, geographic regions, because nowadays these tests are common all over the states and even internationally, and every college will accept either one without bias or preference between them. But it is a turf war in terms of the number of test takers they are trying to capture. Hey folks, welcome back to the podcast today, you just get me talking about the new ACT, which is not all that new, but I wanted to make sure you had my thoughts on it and understood how it is different and how it is the same. And of course, how to decide between it and the SAT. If your student is going to be testing. I'll actually save some of that for another episode on like, how do you develop your own testing strategy here? But today I really want to kind of dive a little deeper into what is this enhanced ACT. So the ACT, the company that makes the ACT is calling it the enhanced ACT, which, you know, is marketing. It is changed whether it is actually better. I'll leave it for you to decide, or maybe the colleges, or some sort of psychometrician to evaluate whether this is a better test. But that's a theme that is going to come up often in my comments today, that a lot of the changes and the rollout are motivated by a desire to capture market shares. There's a lot of like razzle dazzle that doesn't actually translate to necessarily a better test, a more fair measure, better measure of a student's intellect or potential or anything like that. Really, I want you to see this as a turf war between the ACT and the SAT. And it's not turf in terms of geographic regions, because nowadays, these tests are common all over the states and even internationally, and every college will accept either one without bias or preference between them, but it is a turf war in terms of the number of test takers they are trying to capture. And I suppose it is also a turf war in terms of state contracts both of these testing companies, the College Board, which makes the SAT and the ACT, which makes the ACT, are trying to get these very large state contracts to be able to give their test during the school day in the school building, and to be sort of the measure of college readiness for that particular state. And one of the ways they try to win those contracts, besides, you know, offering lower pricing or whatever other kind of perks they want to throw into their deal, is they want to show data that says students prefer this test, not necessarily that students do better on this test, because maybe then it's an easier test. But they want to have a way to say, I guess, quell the fears of the lawmakers who know students really groan at these things. So one of the ways that they're doing that is by shortening the test. And of course, everybody thinks digital is better, so now we also have a digital version. I think that about sums it up. If you want to turn off the episode, that's what you that's what you're going to hear more of, but just in more detail. But you know, before we get into what's changed and what hasn't changed, I do want to kind of catch us up to where we are today. So the ACT was bought by a private equity firm in 2024 and pretty soon after that, they announced this sort of major change to the ACT number one was introducing a digital format and then shortening it to be of similar length to the current digital SAT now. Digital testing was in place for the ACT internationally for several years already, but this is a slightly different version of that digital delivery, and I'm trying to be kind here, but as with many private equity deals, an over emphasis and Focus on the bottom line leads to some very quick, very sloppily implemented changes to a product, and that is absolutely what we're seeing here. So to back up even further than 2024 back in like 2015 ish, i. The ACT became the more taken test. More students were taking the ACT than the SAT. And of course, the SAT couldn't stand for that. They needed to compete for their market share. And that's when we saw the rollout of this new SAT in 2016 and that competition remained stiff. The SAT decided to go even further. And last year, technically, two years ago, they rolled it out internationally, first, and then in 2024 they rolled it out in the US. The SAT went digital to this shorter, slightly more than two hour format, and it served the SAT Well, right? We already hear people talking about testing as the SAT, even though there are two valid choices. It's kind of like Kleenex became the name for those tissues, even though that's the brand, right? So everybody talks about the SAT, not that many people are talking about the ACT. That doesn't mean it's not a test that is welcomed by colleges. And I would also like to point out that doesn't mean it's a test that students should overlook, because oftentimes students can do very well on the ACT even if they're challenged by the SAT. The two tests have different styles and formats, such that some students are just naturally going to be more comfortable on one test than the other. The material they test is pretty much the same. It's just the way that that material is tested is a little different. But I have, you know, other episodes going into the to the differences between those two tests, and I think I've got one planned for a little bit later this fall as well. So the SAT in 2024 digital and shorter, and the ACT, I think, got a little spooked, and this private equity firm said, Hey, we got to go digital and shorter to compete. And so they rolled it out super quick. And as I mentioned, it has been sloppy, but here's the timeline for the ACT, right, in April 2025 just a few months ago, they rolled out the digital enhanced ACT in the United States, and the paper test still existed, but in its old format. So there were a couple of months there where students could take this new digital exam or the old paper exam. But then in September 2025 just a couple weeks ago, the paper version of the enhanced ACT got rolled out, so now students are definitely taking the enhanced ACT, but it could be digital, or it could be paper. That is up to them. And my recommendation, you'll hear me say this again, is to stick with paper. Paper is a lot more familiar to students. You don't have to learn new tools. There are a lot of ways to just sort of interact with the test material a little bit differently on paper. I'm sure there's the rare student who's going to prefer a digital test, but for the most part, students can do better, I believe, on the paper test, because there are behaviors that allow them to avoid careless errors, annotate their materials, eliminate answer choices, you know, things like that that are good test, behaviors that are easier to do on a paper test than on a digital test. One caveat to the fact that now digital and paper are both enhanced, the ACT as if this recording, as of this recording notes that school day testing, the tests that are given during the school day, it's usually like on a random Wednesday, not the Saturday weekend. Administrations, school day testing will remain the old paper act for the time being. I suspect this has to do with sort of the infrastructure of digital testing not quite being there yet, so we'll hear an update about that at some point in the future. But for the most part, if you're testing a weekend, you've got the enhanced ACT, whether it's paper or digital, and sometime in the fall of 2025 they're going to roll out that digital enhanced ACT to international locations. They haven't released the date yet. Okay, so that brings us to today. We've had one administration of this paper, enhanced ACT, and we've had a couple of administrations of the digital enhanced ACT. So to get into our kind of meat of our content, today, I want to talk about first, what's not changing, and not a lot is changing. The scoring scale is going to stay the same. It's still out of 36 and the ACT is telling us that a 30 on the old ACT will mean the same thing to colleges as a 30 on this new one, right? And to that effect, they're not changing their concordance with the SAT. So a 30 on the enhanced ACT will mean what a 30 on the old ACT translated to on the SAT, if you follow that nested grammar, so the scoring stays the same. ACT has had a writing section for a. Long time. This is the essay that students have to write in a timed situation. This is optional, literally at every college. So I don't have any of my students taking it. I'm actually surprised that they didn't sunset the writing test. But it is still there. It is still optional. I don't think your student needs it, but double check your students college list, in case some college starts requiring, you know, have our T's crossed and our eyes dotted here. The other thing that's not changing is the test structure and format. So the SAT is a adaptive test. So depending on how they do on the first verbal section they get their second verbal section might be a little easy or a little hard. So that's what we call adaptive, right? It adapts to how the test taker is, is performing the ACT is a linear test. It's not going to adapt based on how a student does, even if you take it digitally, right? And as I mentioned already, students will still have the option to take the ACT on paper. They don't have to do it digitally, if that's not their strength. So that's what's not changing, and what is changing is the pacing and some of the content and a little tiny bit of the format. I'll dig into that here. So students will have more time per question and fewer questions overall on the enhanced ACT that's really good news for students who like the way the questions are asked. They tend to be pretty straightforward, not so tricky, like the SATs kind of got the sort of brain teaser feel to a lot of their questions. The ACT had never had that. But the challenge on the ACT was you had more questions and less time, so you had to move really, really fast and be accurate. But now students will have more time per question because they're reducing the number of questions in each section. There is a shift in content emphasis, and I'll talk about that in a second, but the tiny little format change that I wanted to mention is that the math section used to have five answer choices, and now only has four. And then the big one that the ACT is trying to use as a way to attract students to it is that the science section is now optional. Now the science section is a little bit of a misnomer. If you've seen this test before, you know that the science section is basically just a technical reading section. It's set up exactly like the reading section is. You've got some material to read, and then you answer a couple questions about that material. The thing that's different is on the science section, that material you're reading is about scientific topics. So it might introduce jargon about genetics or pH or the greenhouse effect, or, you know, any kind of one of these basic science topics that students should be touching in high school, but most of those terms are defined in the passage, so it still is an open note test. The other thing that's different between a science section and a reading section is that the science section often has charts, tables and graphs, so your student needs to be able to read those and then answer the questions. But other than that, it's really just a reading section, right? For a long time, the timing and the number of questions were the same in this new test. It's a little bit different, but my recommendation here is to take the science section, because if your student is testing, they are likely Aiming for a higher score, and maybe applying to one of these schools where testing is required. And in those cases where you're applying and you want a high score to help your application or your it's required, your competition is going to be taking the science section, especially if your student is thinking about majoring in a STEM related field, definitely take the science section. So overall, this makes it a shorter test. If you take the just the required sections, the English, math and reading, it's only two hours and five minutes. If you do the science sections, two hours and 45 minutes, where it used to be two hours and 55 minutes. So we shaved off 10 minutes, but we also shaved off a ton of questions. So English used to have 75 questions. Now it's only 50. Math used to have 60, now it's only 45 reading used to have 40, now it's 36 and science has stayed the same at 40, but they've increased the time limit from 35 minutes to 40 minutes. So you do get a little bit more flexibility there within those questions, there are what they call field test items, and I'm going to just use shorthand. I'm going to call it experimental questions. So typically on these tests, what we've seen is that there is an extra section, usually at the end of the test that is unscored, and students know that it's experimental because they've already gone through the four core sections, or whatever it is, but now what they're doing is integrating those experimental items into the main test sections, and students won't know which ones are experimental until they get their test results back. So out of those 50 English questions. Students, 10 of them are going to be experimental. And because English is structured around certain passages, it's typically those. Those 10 Questions are within a single passage. Math is going to have four experimental questions. Reading has nine. Again, those tend to be within a single passage, and then science will have six. So that's an important thing to pay attention to, pay attention to, especially as your student is practicing, because they may have gotten a couple of questions wrong in English, for example, but you want to see if those questions they got wrong are experimental or not. If they're experimental, it won't affect the student's score, right. They're still worth reviewing and seeing. You know, what do we need to learn here? What do we need to work on? Because you got this question wrong. But just keep in mind that those experimental questions won't impact a student's score. Okay, couple of other things that are changing here. The Digital testing will be through a software that's called ACT gateway, which students technically can download to their device, but they can't use it for practice, the way you can use blue book for the SAT. So if they end up in a situation where they're allowed to use their own technology, their own device, to test on, they will need to download this system, and there's a checklist that they have to run through. The ACT when they first rolled out digital testing was saying, Oh, you can use your own device. We've got our own secure platform, blah, blah, blah. They've since removed that language so it does not look like students will be able to use their own device. But just want you to know what it's called. It's ACT gateway. And then the last change I want to highlight is the way they report the score. So the ACT has four sections each out of 36 for a long, long time, the composite score was just a straight average of those four sections in the enhanced ACT. The composite score will only be the average of English reading and math your science if you're taking it, which I do recommend you take, will be reported separately from the average of English, reading and math. So that is more for the colleges you know, to deal with, but it is something I think consumers should know, because your score reports gonna look different, and I know why you freak out about it. All right, that's what's changing. Let's dig into a little bit more of the details here, right? I'll give you just a quick overview, because this, I feel like, is a really boring episode already, but these are things that are important to know. So in the English section, one of the big changes is, instead of just having answer choices next to the number of a question. Each of those questions will have a question in stem so it will be clear what a student is supposed to do for each question. That I think will help a lot of students who may be unfamiliar haven't practiced a lot. It will help them focus on what needs to be done. Some of the English passages will be shorter, and they are going to include an argumentative passage. So this is kind of the genre of the material that a student is correcting the grammar or phrasing in. In math I mentioned already, we have four answer choices instead of five. There will be fewer questions on quote, advanced topics. End quote, unclear what that is exactly, but they're going to draw their focus away from those. They're also going to have fewer questions requiring a longer reading time. And that, for me, is just a dig at the SAT, where math questions have a lot of reading to do before you get to the part where you can actually do some math. So a SAT has sort of promised, no, we're not going to make you read a ton. We're going to get right to the question. The ACT does not have an online calculator tool if you're doing the digital version of the test. There's no calculator built into that platform the way it is for the SAT. And side note, the SAT built in calculator is called Desmos, and it is really powerful learning that if your student is taking the SAT learning how to use Desmos will save them so much time and effort on the math section, they can answer like 80, almost 90% of the questions without actually knowing any math, which was not a good thing. But let's make this easier for your students. So if they're taking the SAT learn desmos, there is no equivalent tool like that on the ACT students still need to bring their own calculator the way they would on the paper test. All right, moving on to reading and science. The Reading section, one of the bigger changes is they are going to include some shorter passages. The ACT passages usually are in two columns and they take up a full page of the test. But we're seeing in some of the sample tests some short passages that have a fewer number of questions each. So that's something to just be aware of. The reading passages used to always go in a set order of genre like the fiction passage was always first the natural science passage. Is always last. But on the sample material that we've seen, there's no set order of genre. This may stabilize at some point in future, but right now, it's all over the place. And in the ACT's announcement about the changes, it noted that there will be some visual and quantitative formats integrated into the reading section. Now we don't see that in any of the sample materials, so still unclear what they mean by that, and if it's actually going to show up or not. And then we have our science section students have to decide when they're registering for the test, whether they want to take science or not. It's not something they can just opt into or out of on test day, right? You have to plan ahead. They've added a passage. There used to be six passages. Now they're going to be seven, and at least one of them is going to be on what they're calling engineering and design content. They are also increasing the number of what I call outside knowledge questions. So these are ones where the answer is not actually on the page or in one of the charts. It's something they should have learned in a basic science class. So these tend to be things like the examples I've been throwing out, something around the greenhouse effect. What is something around the anatomy of a cell or DNA or something like that? Some, some pretty basic stuff. So it's going to be helpful for for students to review these kind of core topics before they go into this test, all right, I have a lot of details comparing the skill and content emphasis of the old test to the new test. I'm not going to bore you with all these numbers. The main takeaway for each section is as follows, so in English, we're going to have more emphasis on questions about purpose, organization and clarity, math, we're going to have more discretely tested topics. So instead of a geometry problem that integrates some algebra, they're going to be discretely tested and then fewer advanced topics like I mentioned before. Reading is going to have more argument type questions like, Why is this here? Or passage one argues this, but passage two is saying, what right those sorts of questions and science, there's really no significant shift in skill emphasis, though they have made some adjustments to kind of each of their subcategories. And if you want more detail on this, you can look at the ACT I call it the Red Book. It's like the official ACT prep guide. It is a big red book. Pages four through 19 go into a lot of detail about the sub score areas for each section, so you can kind of understand what what to expect. So I recommend looking at that if if your student is preparing, and if your student is preparing, that's a great book to practice with. Speaking of practice materials, we are really limited in practice materials right now, so the ACT released a couple of tests when they actually they released one digital test when they announced the change, but it was just a Frankensteined version of a couple of old tests cut down to the to the size parameters that they have set for this new test. In the red book that I was just talking about, there are four paper tests in this new enhanced format, and you can get access to a digital question bank, but it's really the same questions that are in the book on paper. They're just on a computer screen, and surprisingly, they're on the computer screen in a way that is not how they will look on test day. They're not in that ACT gateway format. They are just on your computer screen, and they're not super useful for taking as practice tests, because the timing is all messed up. There is an online timer, but after each question, you get shown the answers and an explanation, so it slows you down. You can't actually move through the test the way you would if you were taking a digital test. So, you know, I mentioned is a little sloppy. One of the other things I point out here is, in the ACT Red Book, the bubble sheets for each practice test still have five answer choices in the math section, when all of you know because you heard me say it twice already, the new math section only has four answer choices. They just forgot to update the bubble sheets. Okay, talk about sloppy All right, so, rant over limited practice materials until the Act starts releasing officially administered tests. And this is typical when the SAT, you know, changes, and we've seen a lot of those changes over the years, they typically come up with four sample tests that they release, those for students to practice on, and then those get kind of put on the back burner as new tests are released, the ones that they've like officially tested students on. The thing to know about the four practice tests that the ACT Red Book contains is that. Are Frankensteined from previous tests. So, you know, we we did the work to figure out what these tests were. The first test is actually a test from the previous red book. It's just trimmed down. The second test is from December 2021, the third test is from December 2019 and the fourth test is from July 2020, so that all brings me to the point that you can practice on old ACT materials, even if you're taking this new, enhanced version, right? That the test is not that different, and your pacing will be different, of course, but the content and the type of question will be pretty similar. So if your student is practicing for the enhanced ACT and is like, I don't have enough stuff to practice on, and you want to practice on real material, not something created by a test prep company, I would use old ACT material, which you can find online if you are wanting to practice the timing and the pacing, then I would use one of those third party practice materials, because those pacing things will be right. So you kind of got to do both if you want a good approximation of your abilities on this test. All right. The last thing I want to leave you with are some challenges to anticipate. Obviously, I've said it's been sloppy. This rollout has been a little sloppy, but there's some specific things I'll call out. We have seen technical challenges and also proctor related challenges with the rollout of this new test. And we've seen registration errors. Students registered for science but didn't get it, or the other way around. We've seen technical issues like the testing software was glitchy, or the connectivity was glitchy. We've seen score delays. We expected the scores to come out much faster because it's a digital test. But you know, students aren't getting their scores right away. I heard about students being lined up around the block trying to get into a testing center, and the test didn't start till after 10 o'clock, when normally they start. You know, between 830 and nine. You know, just managing the people has been difficult. And the ACT also, unlike the SAT, which typically only uses school buildings for administering their test, the ACT is branched out into like hotel conference rooms and things like that. So it's really a little bit messy. And this isn't to say you shouldn't take the test. If this is the better test for you, it's going to help you get the score you need or you want. By all means, take it. Just be mentally prepared for these kinds of challenges, right? Your student really needs to be able to advocate for themselves. Needs to be able to compartmentalize a little bit on test day, to expect challenges, and then it can be pleasantly surprised if nothing goes wrong, right? But I don't want them to be thrown off by something silly like this and then not perform their best the way they were performing when they were practicing, right? So just sort of be mentally prepared for those challenges. And that's that's really it. That's what's changed on the the enhanced ACT. I think it's important for people to know what these changes are and feel comfortable with them. Maybe look at a test. And as I mentioned, I'll be doing a session soon on, you know, how do you decide SAT, ACT, whether to test or not? So stay tuned for that. But really, I think what students will have to do differently here is just adjust their pacing and in a way that is maybe more comfortable for them, right? They've got more time per question than they used to have on the ACT, so that's not, not a terrible thing at all. If a student is going to take the digital ACT, I highly recommend getting used to the embedded tools in the testing platform, right? So they should be practicing annotating and highlighting and eliminating answer choices on the computer screen and or practicing using their scratch paper very strategically, right? Keeping it organized, using it to do the process of elimination, taking notes on a reading passage, etc, etc. We want them to be able to do those things without adding time to the completion of that question, right the way they would be able to do it on a paper test and then with a computer based test. I'm always worried about attention to detail and eye strain, so that's also something that I recommend working on with a student, helping them understand how to refresh their eyes, how to maintain attention to detail when they're looking at a screen where it's very easy for your eyes to glaze over, perhaps easier than it is to glaze over on a piece of paper in front of you, right? So those are things I want to highlight for you. I'm sure we will be seeing more from the ACT in terms of announcements about you. Know calculator tool, or when it's International, or when you know school day testing is going to change. So I'll do my best to keep you guys updated. But you know, I know there are a lot of other people who are studying this change. If you have questions comments, let me know. Happy to dive in. All right, everybody, I'm going to leave it there. I hope you found this helpful, and I'll see you next time. Hey folks, just a quick note to say that we are going to pause the podcast for probably the balance of of this year. It is the busy season in college admissions. As I'm sure all of you are aware. We've got some looming deadlines, and my focus needs to be elsewhere right now, but I do hope that if you are hungry for more content, you will go back in time and listen to some of our older episodes, or tune into the free master classes that I give every month. You can find those on the Signet website, at Signet education.com/events, and if there is some topic you really want to hear my thoughts on, just send me an email. I'd be happy to talk all right, thank you, and we'll see you some point in the future. Thanks.