In order to keep pace with the rival SAT exam (which has been restructured, shortened, made adaptive, and moved to online administration), ACT, Inc. has announced significant changes to the ACT. CNN has the story:

[Excerpts]

Major changes are coming to the ACT college admissions exam in the spring, the CEO of ACT announced Monday.

The exam will be evolving to “meet the challenges students and educators face” – and that will include shortening the core test and making the science section optional, chief executive Janet Godwin said in a post on the non-profit’s website.

The changes will begin with national online tests in spring 2025 and be rolled out for school-day testing in spring 2026, Godwin said in the post.

The decision to alter the ACT follows changes made to the SAT earlier this year by the College Board, the non-profit organization that develops and administers that test. The SAT was shortened by a third and went fully digital.

Science is being removed from the ACT’s core sections, leaving English, reading and math as the portions that will result in a college-reportable composite score ranging from 1 to 36, Godwin wrote. The science section, like the ACT’s writing section already was, will be optional.

“This means students can choose to take the ACT, the ACT plus science, the ACT plus writing, or the ACT plus science and writing,” Godwin wrote. “With this flexibility, students can focus on their strengths and showcase their abilities in the best possible way.”

Students who choose to take the science section will receive a standalone score for that section in addition to a STEM score that combines the math and science sections. Similarly, the optional writing section already yielded its own score.

The core ACT exam will be significantly shorter, down from about three hours to two hours, Godwin wrote.

“To achieve this, the test will include shorter passages on the reading and English sections and fewer questions in each section – 44 fewer questions in all – allowing students more time to answer each question thoughtfully,” Godwin wrote.

“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,” she said.

The cost of the exam will also go down, Godwin told CNN in an email.

Approximately 60% of students who graduated in 2023 took the ACT exam at least once, according to the organization.

This year, the company began offering a digital version of the exam, though students still can opt to take the ACT with paper and pencil.

 
Forbes has additional details and opinions about the ACT changes:

[Excerpts]

Janet Godwin, CEO of ACT, recently announced changes to the ACT test. Beginning April 2025, there will be more time per question. Overall, the number of questions is being reduced from 215 to 171 with virtually the same amount of time, an overall increase of 22% per question. The ACT will also be making the science section optional and integrating experimental questions into existing sections.

This follows past changes. The ACT began offering a digital version of the test in February. Unlike the SAT, the digital test is not adaptive and is a digital version of the paper test. The ACT began reporting superscore results in April 2021.

In a discussion on Berkley High School student Joshua Swift-Rawal’s Instagram site, 75 Percent Chance, students are generally supportive of the changes. Student Alisha S. felt that "having the option to take the test online makes it feel more like my usual study environment, which helps reduce my stress on test day."

This coincides with major recent changes in the SAT. Students now taking the SAT will now be taking a digital version which is adaptive. The testing time was reduced from three hours to two and the sections reduced from four to two. Each section has two modules, with the performance on the first determining the questions for the second module. The SAT allows a calculator now for all math sections and students may use their own computer (which ACT does not allow). The Reading and Writing section now has shorter passages with single questions (previously there were longer reading passages with multiple questions on each). Math word problems are supposed to be more concise.

How are students to use this information? Some students who took the first all-digital and adaptive SAT thought the test was much harder than expected. When the SAT gave more time per question, students reported that questions were harder and more abstract. ACT has said it is not going to make the questions harder. Sara Laszlo of Test Innovators noted, “Many students reported lower scores on the March SAT than they had received on Bluebook practice tests, the digital PSAT, and previous paper SATs. While this was certainly not true for every individual, the group of students who seemed to be most affected were the top scorers.”

David Blobaum of Summit Prep thinks that this may be an opportunity to get an artificially inflated score. “What is pretty astounding to me, however, is that the ACT has said (and I believe them) that they are not going to make the questions harder — they are literally just giving students more time on them,” he said, later adding, “It is a tempting proposition to bet that the first few ACT tests will be easier to score higher on. So, in the short-term, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a temporary bump in scores.”

The changes are welcome, particularly the increase in time per question. Being able to answer questions quickly is a skill but not necessarily one that is that useful in college or work situations. The flip side of this is that each question now has more effect on the score, with small mistakes having a greater effect.

 
An intriguing article from Forbes suggests that the move of the PSAT, SAT and ACT from pencil-and-paper tests to digital testing will dramatically reduce the amount of student data that will be available to colleges and universities for marketing to prospective applicants:

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As higher ed braces for the Demographic Cliff another possible apocalypse looms: the Search Cliff. Due to the College Board’s shift to a digital PSAT and SAT and digital privacy laws governing school districts, the number of names available for licensing in the College Board’s Student Search Service will drop by nearly 40% over the next four years. Search is a primary lead source for student recruitment at hundreds of colleges and universities around the country, and the loss of 40% of those leads will be a critical blow to enrollment. To successfully navigate the Search Cliff, enrollment leaders must act now to diversify lead sources and overhaul marketing and communication operations.

The College Board's shift to digital PSAT and SAT tests has significant implications for Search. Data privacy laws like SOPIPA in California prevent school district vendors from selling or sharing digitally acquired student data. More than 40 states now have a similar law on the books which backed the College Board into a corner. Starting in fall 2023 (PSAT) and spring 2024 (school-day SAT), students who take a school-day test will no longer be available in Search. Students who take a weekend SAT, or enroll through other College Board properties like BigFuture will still be available.

This change was confirmed by the College Board during a webinar earlier this Spring, along with the announced rollout of “Connections.” While the College Board has positioned Connections as a replacement for Search, the reality is bleak. Connections are essentially display ads, the viewership of which relies on students not only downloading a standalone College Board app to access their scores but also continuing to use this app once they have viewed their scores. Even for the small proportion of students that do stick around within the app, successful inquiry generation will then rely on click-through rates from display ads (rarely above 1%).

The Search Cliff is enormous. The latest projections show a massive drop in name availability for the student cohorts that will enter college in the fall of 2026 and 2027. Fall 2026 will have 700,000 fewer names than Fall 2023, a drop of 32% from ~2.2 million to ~1.5 million. Fall 2027 will see a drop of 840,000 (-38%), all the way to ~1.35 million.

While new student opt-ins to Search from school-day testing will end this fall, the drop-off in Search will not be immediate. This is due to the “install base” - current underclassmen who have already opted into Search. For example, the vast majority of students in the Fall 2024 cohort have already taken their last PSAT and school-day SAT. Even Fall 2025 has a large cohort of sophomores already enrolled in Search (the Sophomore PSAT is the largest for opt-ins). But the College Board will miss out on enough school-day testing during these students’ junior year to cause a 12% drop in name availability for Fall 2025.

This multi-year drop-off is what allows the College Board to make the claim that “Search is very strong.” But for Fall 2026 recruitment and beyond, it will be remarkably weak.

The exact impact on an institution will vary based on its name-buying strategy and enrollment funnel. But no college or university that buys College Board names will escape unscathed.

The 38% drop in name availability is just the tip of the iceberg. That 38% figure refers to the end-state: the number of students that will still end up in Search by the end of their senior year. But the impact on name availability in younger cohorts will be even more extreme.

Instead of a 38% drop off, you will have 80-90% fewer 9th graders, 70% fewer sophomores, and 50% fewer juniors available in search. Enrollment teams that buy underclassmen names to build their funnel will need to make significant operational changes to adjust to this new reality.

Billions of dollars of net tuition revenue are at stake due to the Search Cliff. Enrollment leaders that do not act now are taking on immense risk and volatility for their institutions.

 
News articles continue to appear regarding the severe lack of SAT/ACT testing dates available to west coast students, particularly in California. The Mercury News covers the situation in the San Jose area:

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...as elite schools like Stanford, Caltech, Harvard and Yale reverse their test-optional policies, Bay Area students attempting to take the SAT before college applications are due this winter might have to travel several hours or even out of state to nab a coveted spot — an especially challenging situation for lower-income students.

A recent search by a reporter of SAT testing centers through the College Board found disheartening results. Seats for the August, October and November testing dates were fully booked within 100 miles of San Jose and San Francisco, while just a handful of seats remained for the December and March exams — most of which were in locations several hours away, in cities like Sacramento, Sonora and Folsom.

Leslie Reckler, who sits on the West Contra Costa County Unified school board, ended up traveling to Reno, Nevada, so her daughter could take the exam last fall — the closest testing center she could find. Reckler said the experience “wasn’t ideal” as she had to take off work and the trip was expensive.

The College Board blamed the lack of availability on host schools unwilling to staff and run weekend test centers, but others pointed to low pay for proctors and schools ditching the testing requirement.

California universities’ switch to “test-blind” and test-optional admission policies, which began several years ago, has resulted in fewer test centers, despite stable demand from students and some schools reversing those policies, said Priscilla Rodriguez, the College Board’s senior vice president for college readiness assessments.

In California, there are now fewer than half as many SAT testing sites as there were before the pandemic, Rodriguez said.

It’s not just the SAT. Catherine Hofmann, the ACT’s vice president of state and federal programs, also said the limited number of test centers in California is unique to the state and concentrated in the Bay Area.

“This isn’t replicated across the nation,” Hofmann said.

Rodriguez said the College Board is addressing capacity issues by opening test centers in nontraditional venues such as hotels and convention centers. The College Board said those partnerships added over 9,000 seats in the Bay Area for the May and June tests.

But the test’s new digital format relies on strong Wi-Fi networks able to support hundreds of individual connections — a feature of many school campuses but not necessarily hotels.

Just last month, parents and students were outraged when the Wi-Fi at the Marriott Hotel in downtown Oakland began to sputter and freeze just as 1,400 students were getting ready to take the exam. The resulting hours of chaos led to the test’s cancellation — an ordeal for which the College Board apologized — and the botched exam was ultimately rescheduled for later that month in San Francisco at a different location.

The mishap happened after Oakland’s school district had stopped offering campuses as testing locations during the COVID-19 pandemic and never resumed the practice.
[End excerpts]

 
Over the past decade, there have been many instances of widespread test and score cancellation on the SAT (especially overseas) because of the theft of test forms, or due to students taking advantage of time zone differences as identical test forms have been administered. Now the College Board's Advanced Placement tests (some of which have been digitized and administered online starting in May 2024) have been compromised by an organized cheating ring, and this raises concerns about the future test security of the new digital SAT.

[Excerpts]

“We have canceled more AP Exams than usual after identifying students who participated in unethical conduct,” Holly Stepp, the College Board’s executive director of media relations, wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. She added that “the total number remains a fraction of 1 percent of exams.”

The “unethical conduct” was a leak of test materials in May that made its way onto the international black market. Those materials managed to reach an unusually large number of students this year in a globe-spanning cash-for-questions operation—though Stepp said that “none of the materials were so widely shared that we needed to cancel entire exam subjects or scores from whole countries.”

Still, the security compromise was significant enough that the College Board is re-evaluating its timeline for digitizing the AP exams, which it hopes will make them less vulnerable to leaks and other traditional modes of cheating.

“Based on these challenges, we are reexamining the delivery of our exams to thwart theft and cheating and thereby avoid more widespread cancellations in the future,” Stepp wrote. “Digitally administered AP Exams are much more secure than shipping paper exams in boxes to thousands of locations weeks in advance.”

The means of cheating are changing as the tests themselves change. This past March the College Board introduced its new, completely digital SAT, which the nonprofit says is more secure due to its adaptive nature: students receive different questions later in the test depending on how well they do early on. After the latest security compromise, Stepp wrote that the College Board is looking to “accelerate our current road map” to do the same for AP tests.

 
The San Francisco Chronicle explains "Why getting into a top U.S. college is about to get even more difficult":

If you are entering your junior or senior year of high school and hope to attend a selective college, we have some bad news for you. Getting into top colleges might get a whole lot harder in the next few years, as the number of prime college-age applicants in the U.S. is about to reach a generational peak.

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, almost 4.5 million people will be 17 — the typical age for entering senior year — at the beginning of the 2024 and 2025 school years, up from between 4.3 and 4.4 million over the previous five years. This means that for the next few college cycles, there will be more total eligible students that can apply — potentially intensifying competition. The number will drop quickly in the years after 2025.

This will impact those that are applying to highly competitive schools the most. Students applying to non-competitive colleges, which admit more people and have less rigid requirements, are less likely to be impacted.

When the population of high school seniors bulges, competition to get into selective colleges becomes “fiercer” because these schools are selecting from a much larger pool of qualified applicants, said Angel Perez, CEO of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

California is seeing a similar jump in the number of seniors. In 2024 and 2025, Census Bureau numbers show there could be around 525,000 kids that will be 17 at the start of the school year. That’s higher than any recent year but 2022. California will also see a precipitous decline in senior-age students after 2025.

The current bulge in 17-year-olds can be traced back to the baby boom that occurred in 2007, according to Peace Bransberger, a senior research analyst at the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education. Experts point to the Great Recession to explain why birth rates fell quickly after 2007.

So will it get easier to get into selective colleges for students in the late 2020s and 2030s who are part of smaller cohorts? Not necessarily, experts say. That’s partially because these schools don’t need to let in students who don’t meet their standards just to get tuition dollars.

Highly selective colleges — for example, those within the Ivy League — depend mostly on endowments, rather than tuition dollars, for their finances, said Perez. These institutions have more agency to reduce the number of students they admit according to population changes.

Colleges that are more dependent on tuition to function will likely be hit harder by the decline in students, Perez added. Around 70% of colleges and universities in the United States admit a majority of the students who apply for admission, according to Perez. Those schools' finances may be hit by a lack of students, and forced to shut down programs.