As more college applicants decide to take entrance exams and elite schools return to pre-pandemic norms to require the SAT or ACT, students face a key question: Which test should they take?
Overwhelmingly, students have picked the SAT in the past few years, making it the most popular standardized test for U.S. high-schoolers applying to college. Among the class of 2025, 45 percent more students took the SAT than the ACT, numbers reported by the testing companies show.
As it attempts to claw back market share, the ACT has made key changes in the past two years that are helping to reshape college entrance exams. It has gone through an ownership change, replaced its chief executive and revamped the test, addressing complaints that the old test took too many hours. Company executives said they are already seeing positive results.
“Our numbers are growing substantially,” said Catherine Hofmann, a senior vice president for the ACT Education Corp., the Iowa company that owns the test.
The optimism comes after a long slide in popularity, financial questions and concerns about the test’s future.
A decade ago, more graduating seniors took the ACT than the SAT. But the SAT edged past the ACT in 2018 after a significant redesign and has since widened its lead. About 47 percent of U.S. students who graduated high school in 2025 took the SAT, compared to 36 percent who took the ACT.
The shift comes as college enrollment hit a 10-year high in the fall and more students are reporting test scores for admissions.
Both the SAT and ACT aim to measure students’ core verbal and math skills. But there are notable differences that students and states consider when choosing between the two. The SAT is now exclusively digital, and adaptive, asking harder or easier questions based on how students do at the beginning to try to more precisely gauge performance.
The ACT offers both online and paper versions and is linear, asking a series of questions regardless of how students perform early on.
Then last fall, the ACT shortened the core part of the test by 50 minutes to 2 hours and 5 minutes — nine minutes less than the SAT. The company also expanded the availability of electronic versions of the test, and gave schools and students the option of whether to include the science section.
“They are trying to ratchet back some of their share,” said Rob Franek, editor in chief of the Princeton Review, one of the country’s largest test preparation companies.
The ACT also became part of a for-profit venture — unlike the SAT.
The nonprofit that long administered the test, ACT Inc., struck a deal in 2024 to sell its testing operations to a private equity firm, Nexus Capital Management of Los Angeles.
The sale came after ACT made several rounds of job cuts and reported more than $113 million in losses from fiscal years 2019 to 2022 before turning a profit again in 2023. As part of the deal, ACT changed its name to IntermediaryEd and retained a nearly 20 percent stake in a new holding company for the tests, called ACT Education Corp.
Some advocates raised concerns about the ownership shift, even though many textbook companies and other education firms are for-profit.
“Private equity’s core obligation is not to students, families, or educators, it’s to investors seeking maximum return,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 1.8 million union members. “That creates a dangerous misalignment.”
Harry Feder, executive director of National Center for Fair & Open Testing, also known as FairTest, which scrutinizes standardized tests, said the new owner could ultimately decide to get rid of the ACT test altogether if it doesn’t prove sufficiently profitable — “leaving no competition in the market.”
Without competition, Feder said it’s possible the College Board, which administers the SAT, could decide to boost test fees and be less responsive to concerns by students and high schools. “We have antitrust laws for a reason,” he said.
But Hofmann, the ACT Education executive, said the new owners gave it access to additional resources and said the company is solidly in the black. It also offers other products, such as career assessment tests, that broaden its portfolio.
“We are not going anywhere,” she said. “We are financially stronger.”
Hofmann also said the testing operations have retained the people who worked there when it was owned by a nonprofit.
“We are still the same assessment company,” she said. “We have the same mission.”
Having a choice matters to students, because many top colleges require students to take the SAT or ACT or strongly consider the results.
Princeton University, for instance, announced plans to drop its test-optional policy in October, leaving Columbia University as the only Ivy League school that doesn’t require test scores. Most colleges temporarily dropped their testing requirements during the pandemic, but some have since reinstated the mandates.
Feder, the FairTest executive director, said more than 90 percent of four-year colleges are either test-blind or test-optional. But since the pandemic, more students have taken the test to get an upper-hand in admissions. A majority of students who filed applications through the Common Application by Jan. 1 included their test scores.
While the SAT has more test takers nationally, the split varies markedly by state. Historically, the ACT has been more popular in many Midwestern and Southern states, while the SAT has long been more widely used along the West and East Coasts.
That’s partly because some states use either the ACT or SAT to measure student performance, requiring virtually every student to take one specific test. Over the past two years, the ACT contracted with South Dakota and Illinois, while the College Board persuaded Kentucky to switch to the SAT.
And even when students decide to take the test again on their own, many stick with the test they already took in school and are most familiar with.
“So much is shaped by these state-level partnerships,” said Priscilla Rodriguez, a senior vice president at the College Board, the New York nonprofit that administers that SAT. “It is pretty clear regionally and state by state.”
Ethan Cantus, 16, goes to school in Santa Ana, California, a state where more students historically take the SAT (even though the state does not have an exclusive contract with either testing company). Cantus took the SAT in December and said he’d only consider trying the ACT if he needs it for a specific college.
“The SAT is a lot more well known,” he said.
Despite the differences, most colleges accept scores from either.
“It’s a myth that colleges prefer one or the other,” said Franek of the Princeton Review. “They are completely agnostic.”
Rebecca John, a high school junior in Andover, Massachusetts, said she wasn’t sure which test to take, so a guidance counselor recommended a free online diagnostic test.
“It told me the SAT was a better fit for me,” she recalls.
John, 16, has since taken the SAT twice. “I think I am going to stick with the SAT,” she said. Though, she added, it’s still possible she could still take the ACT later on.
Educators like Julie Park, a University of Maryland education professor, are rooting for both testing companies to thrive, saying it’s vital that schools and students continue to have a choice, so long as colleges require standardize test scores.
“It would be healthy to have at least two players that can hopefully offer different options,” Park said.
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