Something wonderful happened! One month ago, ACT, Inc. announced a partnership with the National Test Prep Association (NTPA – of which Woodlands Test Prep is a Founding Member, and I am a Board member) such that NTPA members are now – finally! – allowed to test on all national test dates. We are so excited for this opportunity! We are also an official ACT Affiliate, which means that we can legally and freely use official ACT materials in our test prep practice. We are very honored!
Four members of our team and I took the October 18th test: three on paper and two digitally using the Bring Your Own Device platform. We tested at three different test centers. Our experiences, combined with my NTPA colleagues’ experiences gathered on Zoom to informally debrief from their testing experiences this past Saturday help form Woodlands Test Prep’s impressions of this new test format.
Our hot takes from this weekend’s testing
Who should consider the ACT now?
- For prep starting in January 2026, we revert to our previous guidance that all students should take a mock ACT and a mock SAT (or use their PSAT) scores to determine on which test they are naturally higher-scoring.
- Students with extra time accommodations or students who are scoring below median (and certainly below SAT 1000) often can move their ACT score to a higher level than an SAT score.
- Students for whom the SAT verbal section is a particular challenge can also frequently move their ACT English and Reading scores to a higher level than their SAT verbal score because of the lower complexity of the ACT verbal sections.
Time pressure: While we expected the test to feel significantly less time-pressured, it didn’t feel measurably so.
- The shift in English from 60% grammar (fast) to 60% reading analysis (slower) meant that what one hand gave, the other hand – for the most part – took away.
- Math’s change from 60 questions to 45 questions means the difficulty level ramps up almost from the get-go. Talking in big, round numbers, ACT essentially eliminated 15 easy questions, meaning the remaining questions take longer and the “rare” topics will be a bigger deal. Again, structurally there is more time per question but that time is needed.
- Reading got the most “more time per question” in the move to the enhanced ACT and did, in fact, feel **slightly** less time pressed. That being said, there are measurably fewer “direct evidence” questions (go find the thing in the passage and find the answer that matches it word for word), so the mix of questions takes longer overall.
- Science had the most diverse set of opinions about the depth of change and how that affected timing. Stay tuned once we get the test questions in a few weeks. We all agreed that more “outside knowledge” was required and that there were more “mathy” questions that required a calculation or two.
Digital versus Paper: Paper is far superior. Can confirm. See our blog post for all the details we still stand behind.
- Bottom line: ACT is NOT suited to the digital format with long passages and graphs to reference. The online tools are NOT set up to overcome that hurdle.
- While our two tutors had a smooth digital experience, MANY students around the country did not. Reddit is full of technical horror stories from the weekend.
- Desmos will be integrated into the Saturday testing system during this school year. That integration WILL NOT overcome the inherent other problems with taking the ACT in a digital format. So don’t stay tuned for that!
Variability: Fewer scored items – on some sections, *dramatically* fewer items – necessarily means more variability in section scores and composite scores.
- A couple of “careless mistakes” (what we would call “process errors”) can make a much bigger difference, particularly at the top of the scoring scale.
- One potential outcome is that testing more than 2 – 3 times if your target schools superscore may allow the student to take advantage of that variability.
- The dearth of enhanced ACT practice material fully reflecting the tests that students (and tutors!) are actually seeing is a problem. It’s hard to be fully prepared if you don’t have adequate materials to do so. Not enough preparation material leads to more variability. Adequate materials are a short-term issue though.
The testing process was smooth-ish here locally BUT….
- Test center coordinators and proctors aren’t stoked about all the options; those options make their jobs more confusing.
- Students with science/no science and writing/no writing were all mixed together in one room. Most of us had proctors who were confused (therefore making the students confused) about processes. Students getting up at various times to leave when their sections were completed felt disruptive.
- Writing the end time on the board and having a clock available for paper testers does not appear to be part of the test center requirements or proctor script. Students will need to be prepared for this. It even reduced the performance of many professional tutors who are completely prepared for the test.
- All the digital/paper choices mean that students end up with fewer test center options in a particular driving radius because schools must essentially choose to be paper or digital, but not both. Some of us drove 45 minutes!
- Almost all students took Science at all locations. Other regions around the country reported similar experiences. Over half of the students at my location, though, also took writing! (Yikes!) But that doesn’t seem to be true at the other two local locations or around the country.
We are hard at work fine-tuning our curriculum to target the new test format and question proportions on the enhanced ACT. #nerdalert 🤓 We’re excited!!
We plan to continue to have at least one member of the team test at each available test date so that we can monitor the evolution of this new format in real time.
We’re looking forward to talking with you about the changes and what they mean for your students! Let us know how we can help!
