The ACT® exam is not 50 years old. It is both older and much younger than that, a contradiction I’ll explain shortly. No, I am 50 years old, and on June 13th I took my Marks Education #2 pencils, my graphing calculator, and my admissions ticket to a local high school, squeezed my 50-year-old self into one of those uncomfortable L-shaped student desks (how have those not been upgraded since the 1990s?), and took the ACT®.
It is not so strange. We tutors at Marks Education regularly take the tests for which we tutor in order to better understand both the subtle changes that tests undergo year to year and the stresses our students feel when they have to wake up early on a Saturday and endure a set of challenges that seem to have an outsized influence on their college admissions. As members of the National Test Prep Association, Marks Education tutors have permission from the ACT® organization to take the test in the same environments our students do. I’ve sat, along with students, for an SAT or ACT® nearly every year over the last dozen. But this year’s sitting was different. This year’s sitting was “Enhanced.”
We joke often about the oddly promotional language choices we see coming out of the College Board and the ACT® when they title their tests and sections. We are now in the age of the Enhanced ACT®, the official name of the version of the ACT® that is only a year old. ACT®s that were administered before the summer of 2025 are now called Legacy ACT®s. To be honest, the two versions are not that different. In fact, unlike the SAT, the ACT® exam, a grouping of (historically) four tests that contribute to an overall “composite” score out of 36, has not really been overhauled in a substantial way since its inception in 1959.
Let’s discuss what has changed and what hasn’t:
- The ACT® did not “go digital,” as the SAT had done a few years ago. The ACT® always had a digital option, and it is the only way for international students to take the ACT®.
- Many students in the U.S. have had trouble getting access to the digital ACT®. For example, I registered for one which got cancelled a few weeks before the test, an experience many students have unfortunately had, and by then there was no alternative site available for the digital test within 50 miles.
- We generally don’t recommend our students take it digitally if they can avoid it, as the digital interface makes working on the Reading and Science sections more difficult.
- The biggest change was designating the Science section optional, rendering it, like the optional Essay section, unnecessary for most students. Very few colleges require or recommend the Science section, and it does not contribute, even if taken, to the composite score.
- A student who does not take the Science section will have a much shorter test than what they would have experienced with a Legacy ACT®, especially since the implementation of field–tested (uncounted) questions has eliminated the necessity of the old fifth“experimental” section.
- In each section, a student now gets a little more time per question than they used to.
- The English and Math sections are each ten minutes shorter than they were on the Legacy ACT®, making all four sections similar in length.
- A few other stylistic tweaks have streamlined the test so that students generally feel a bitless rushed and questions and sections feel a bit more uniform.
When the Enhanced ACT® was first rolled out, we were skeptical that students would be able to gain the same kinds of score improvements as the ones we saw on the old version, and we were, understandably, dubious that the scaling of the test and its concordance with SAT scores would be as reliable. However, though the Enhanced ACT® rollout was far from perfect, we have found that students appreciate the more reasonable pace, the option of skipping the Science section, and the shorter length. What’s more, we have seen score improvements on par with those we were able to help students achieve on the Legacy ACT®.
After the first year, it is safe to say that the ACT® has held its place as still one of two fair options for college admissions tests. Some students will still be better-suited to take the SAT, and others will find the ACT® more palatable. For my part, I found the experience of taking the Enhanced ACT® to actually be an enhancement. The English and Math sections never needed to be as long as they were on the Legacy ACT®, the extra time on the Reading and Science sections feels more balanced than in the past, and for students opting out of the Science section, the shortened length of the overall test makes it all seem less excruciating than it used to.
But seriously, can we do something about those desks?