Dive Brief:
- The ACT college admissions exam will be shortened and its science portion will be optional beginning in spring 2025 for national online test takers and in spring 2026 for those who participate in school-day testing.
- On Monday, the company that administers the test — also called ACT — announced that the changes will drop the exam’s run time from three hours to two.
- The news comes after the College Board shortened and fully digitized its entrance exam, the SAT, earlier this year. Those changes also reduced the exam from three to two hours.
Dive Insight:
The changes could affect how the ACT is weathering the test-optional movement, which gained significant traction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, fewer high school students have been taking the ACT and the SAT.
College assessment providers have expanded their options for digital tests and making changes to the exams with the stated goal of offering students flexibility or making the experience less stressful.
Last year, ACT CEO Janet Godwin said the pandemic-related disruptions gave her organization the chance to think differently about what aspects of their product were working. On Monday, Godwin said that the newly announced changes were guided by higher education and K-12 stakeholders.
To cut the core test down to two hours, it will have 44 fewer questions, and the reading and English portions will have shorter passages.
“This change is designed to make the testing experience more manageable for students, enabling them to perform at their best without the fatigue that often accompanies longer exams,” Godwin said in a statement.
The science section, soon to be optional, will operate similarly to the ACT’s elective writing portion. Students will have the option to add science, writing or both to their core exam, and each extra section will generate a separate score from the overall composite.
The changes come during a tempestuous testing climate.
About 2,000 four-year institutions have test-optional or test-free policies for the fall 2025 application cycle, according to FairTest, a group that advocates for limited application of entrance exams. Some institutions, like the State University of New York, have even shifted to test-optional permanently.
But some experts predict the test-optional tide may be turning again. Several Ivy League colleges — including Harvard, Yale and Cornell universities — have revived their testing requirements, along with other highly selective institutions like Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
The ACT company is undergoing changes outside of updates to its core product. It was recently acquired by a private equity firm, a move that began the nonprofit’s transition into a for-profit organization.
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