Test Prep
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SAT vs ACT: What's the difference and which test should you take?
How the 2026 formats differ and how to pick the test that suits you
Alex H
Princeton & Columbia University Graduate
Summary
Colleges accept the SAT and ACT equally, so the right test is the one where you score higher. Take a full-length official practice test of each, compare the two results through the official concordance, and put the rest of your prep into whichever one comes out stronger. The comparison looks different in 2026 than it did two years ago. The SAT is fully digital and adaptive at 2 hours 14 minutes. The enhanced ACT has cut its core test to about 2 hours 5 minutes and made science an optional add-on that no longer counts toward your composite.
How the SAT and ACT compare in 2026
The SAT and ACT test similar academic skills but reward different strengths, and both have changed substantially in the past two cycles. The SAT went fully digital in 2024, dropping from a 3 hour paper test to an adaptive one that runs just over two hours and returns test scores in days. The ACT rolled out its enhanced format across all national test dates in September 2025, trimming the core test from about 2 hours 20 minutes to 2 hours 5 minutes and making science optional.
| SAT | ACT |
Format | Digital, adaptive by module | Linear. Paper or digital in the US, digital only outside it |
Testing time | 2 hrs 14 min | About 2 hrs 5 min core (plus 40 min optional science) |
Sections | Reading and Writing, Math | English, Math, Reading (plus optional Science and Writing) |
Score range | 400 to 1600 | 1 to 36 (composite averages English, Math and Reading) |
Questions | 98 | 131 core (108 of them scored), 171 with science |
Pacing | About 82 seconds per question | About 57 seconds per question |
Math coverage | Deep on algebra, data analysis, advanced math | Broader: algebra, geometry, trigonometry, statistics |
Reading | Short passages, one question each | 4 longer passages, 9 questions each |
Science | No separate section; data interpretation built into questions | Optional 40-question section. Excluded from the composite, feeds a separate STEM score |
Calculator | Allowed on all math; Desmos graphing calculator built into the app | Allowed on all math; on-screen for online testers, or bring your own |
Three of the gaps that used to separate these tests aren't that big anymore. The ACT's core test is now the shorter of the two, if only by a few minutes, and the digital SAT lets you use a calculator on every math question the way the ACT always has. ACT math has also dropped from five answer choices to four, which is what the SAT has always had.
Pacing is the exception, and for most students it's what the decision comes down to.
The right test is the one where you score higher after a full-length diagnostic of each. Everything else is secondary.
Do colleges prefer the SAT or the ACT?
Neither. Every US college that considers testing accepts both equally and compares them through official concordance tables. Choosing the SAT because it seems more prestigious is one of the most common mistakes families make.
At Harvard, there wasn't a preference for the SAT over the ACT. Both were considered equally. What mattered was the strength of the score in the context of the student's overall application.
Devery D.
Former Harvard Admissions Officer
Key changes to the SAT & ACT
What has changed is how many top schools are requiring standardized test scores again. For fall 2027 entry, six of the eight Ivies require the SAT or ACT: Harvard, Yale, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell and Penn. Princeton and Columbia are test-optional for one final cycle and will require scores from fall 2028 entry. Stanford, MIT, Caltech, Georgetown and Johns Hopkins ask for scores too. For most applicants to selective schools, the question is no longer whether to test. It's which test to take and how well to prepare for it.
About 2 million students in the class of 2025 took the SAT against 1.38 million for the ACT, so the SAT is more popular by roughly 45%. That's a fact about how many people take each test, and not about which one suits you best.
SAT vs ACT Test Takers
SAT59%ACT41%
Source: College Board & ACT, 2025
What changed with the digital SAT
The SAT is now fully digital, taken on College Board's Bluebook app, and adaptive: each section runs two modules, and how you do on the first sets the difficulty of the second. Scores come back within days, which is much faster than the paper test ever managed.
The effect is a test that rewards precision. You get about 95 seconds per math question and 71 per Reading and Writing question, which is room to reason, and early accuracy raises your scoring ceiling. It cuts both ways, though: stumble in the first module and you get routed to an easier second one, where the highest scores simply aren’t available. The first module counts twice, once toward your score and again in deciding which range you’re playing for. Nothing else on the test does as much.
What changed with the enhanced ACT
The enhanced ACT reached national online testing in April 2025, became standard for all national test dates that September, and arrived in school-day testing in spring 2026. Passages are shorter, and science is now an add-on you select at registration.
It also gives you more time per question than the legacy ACT did, in every section, and most of all in reading, where ACT's own figures show 53 seconds a question becoming 67. Reading gained five minutes while shedding four questions, so the section with the worst reputation for time pressure is the one that changed most. The ACT's reputation as the rushed test describes a format that no longer exists, and advice built on it, including from a parent who took it themselves, is out of date.
Should you add the optional ACT science section?
No school on the top-20 list requires it, so it’s a strategic choice. Caltech reads Science and Writing as optional subscores if you send them, which is the shape of it elsewhere too.
Skipping it costs you the STEM score, which is the average of your Math and Science results. For an engineering, computer science or physical sciences applicant that's a number speaking directly to your major, and Science measures how you read data and evaluate experiments instead of what you've memorized. (Writing works the same way, giving you an ELA score.) Vanderbilt goes further, counting Science into your superscore only where it lifts the total and disregarding it when it doesn’t, so there the section can only help you.
What it costs you is 40 extra minutes of testing, which pushes your finish about 50 minutes later. If your major has nothing to do with science, skip it and put the time into your core sections, and either way check each school's testing page before you register.
Don't choose the SAT because it sounds more prestigious
A common assumption is that the SAT is the better or more respected format, and the fact that more students take it seems to confirm that. The truth is colleges accept either test equally, and how many students take each one says nothing about which one you’ll score higher on. Choosing on reputation or headcount means prepping for the test where your ceiling may be lower. The only reliable criteria are your diagnostic results and how each format feels to take.
Which test should you take?
Neither test is harder in the abstract. The table above shows what differs; the question is which of those differences describes you.
The SAT tends to fit students who
• Read carefully and do well with inference questions on short passages
• Stay accurate early, since the adaptive format rewards it
• Would rather work through fewer questions with more time on each
The ACT tends to fit students who
• Read quickly and hold pace across long passages
• Would rather the difficulty didn't change under them mid-test
• Have broad math coverage, including trigonometry and statistics
Pacing is where most families draw the wrong conclusion. Feeling rushed on a first diagnostic isn't a verdict on the test, because time pressure is a capacity you build with practice.
Maybe the first couple of weeks, you do half an hour a day, you can increase that to 45 minutes, 1 hour a day, and you kind of work your way up so that when it comes to test day, you have the stamina.
Tess L.
Crimson Director of In-Person Tutoring
So discomfort on both tests likely means you haven't trained yet. What a cold diagnostic can tell you is which of the two you handle relatively better, and that comparison holds whatever your absolute scores.
How to choose which test is right for you?
The most reliable way to choose is a three-step process, the same one Crimson strategists use with our students.
1. Take one full-length official practice test of each.
Bluebook for the digital SAT, ACT.org's enhanced-format materials for the ACT, both timed and both current-format. College Board retired several older digital practice tests in 2026 for being too easy, and students routinely report the real SAT feels harder than the practice, so treat your SAT number as a comparison and not a hard prediction. A legacy-format ACT test will tell you nothing about pacing.
If you don't want to take a full practice test, you can try our free digital mini practice tests to get a feel for both test formats:
2. Compare your scaled scores using the official ACT and College Board concordance.
Raw comparison across a 1600 scale and a 36 scale means nothing without it. As an anchor, a 34 concords to about 1500 and a 30 to about 1370. The tables still apply to the enhanced ACT, since ACT kept the 1 to 36 scale and its linking study found enhanced and legacy scores interchangeable. Treat a concorded score as a comparison and not a conversion.
3. Weigh fit alongside the numbers.
If the scores are close, factor in how each pace felt, format preference, your intended major, and how each test's strengths line up with your school list.
Then commit. There's no admissions advantage to excelling at both, so once one clearly serves you better, that’s where you should focus all further prep. Students often surprise themselves here, which is why this step comes before any prep investment.
Does your score still matter once you choose?
Yes, and more than at the peak of test-optional, when most of the most selective schools didn’t require one. A score confirms your academic case and gets held against the rest of your file. A 1550 reads differently for a prospective engineer than it does for a humanities applicant, because an admissions officer compares your math score against your intended major.
Caltech has written that into policy further than anyone. It reads subscores and never the composite, and a subscore in its top band reaches the committee as a range with your exact number hidden, while a lower one is shown in full. A strong score gets anonymized and a weak one gets exposed, which tells you something about how the rest of the field reads scores without saying it out loud.
A large portion of the applicant class had good grades, could do the work, had solid testing. But that's table stakes once you get to a certain level.
Eddy C.
Former Yale Admissions Officer
So at that level a score has one job: be strong enough so that no one pauses on it. Whatever distinguishes you has to come from the rest of your application.
Can you submit both SAT and ACT scores?
Yes, colleges accept scores from both tests on one application. Do it only when the second test adds something the first can't. A strong ACT with Science gives you a STEM score, which the SAT has no equivalent for, so a quantitative applicant has a reason to send two. Otherwise send the stronger one, since a weaker concorded score sitting next to it does nothing for you.
Superscoring varies more than the general rule suggests, and the variation changes both whether a retake helps and what you put on the application:
• MIT builds your superscore itself, so report every full sitting and don't enter a combined score. Stanford wants the opposite, asking you to enter your ACT superscore composite yourself.
• Harvard won't build you a superscore, but it does note your highest SAT section scores across dates. For the ACT it reads your strongest single sitting.
• Carnegie Mellon superscores the SAT and won't accept a superscored ACT at all, because of the composite included in the score report.
ACT builds a superscore automatically from your best section results across test dates, using English, Math and Reading from 2025 onward, and you choose whether to send that or one date's scores. Whether a school wants it is a separate question, as the bullets above show. If you have results from both the legacy and enhanced formats, check each school's policy first, since the composite comes from three sections now instead of four.
Superscoring is worth more on the enhanced ACT than it used to be. Only 108 of the 131 core questions count toward your composite, and you can't tell which; the rest are questions ACT is trialing. With half as many scored questions as the old format had, one unlucky test day swings your composite further than it used to.
When does switching tests make sense?
If you plateau on one test after sustained prep, switching is often smarter than grinding further.
A plateau after real preparation usually points to a format mismatch and not an ability ceiling, and a fresh diagnostic on the other exam costs one Saturday morning. The word doing the work there is after. A low first diagnostic isn't a plateau, it's a starting point, and switching on the basis of one cold diagnostic means starting over for no reason.
When should you take the SAT or ACT?
Start earlier than feels necessary, and prep only once you're academically ready. The cadence Crimson strategists recommend:
• Sophomore year: take diagnostics of both tests to find your natural fit and your knowledge gaps.
• Summer before junior year: begin structured prep, once you have the coursework foundation to make real gains. Ramp up gradually so you build test-day stamina instead of burning out in week two.
• Junior year: take your first official test in the fall or early spring, leaving room for a retake. March and August are the two most heavily used dates, because each one follows a long break.
• Senior fall: December is typically the last usable date for regular-decision deadlines. Early-round cutoffs come earlier, usually October or November.
Schedule test dates around your academic peaks: summer gaps when your course load is lightest, the weeks after AP or final exams when recall is strongest, and quiet stretches in your extracurricular calendar. Testing planned this way protects your GPA and leaves senior fall free for essays and applications.
How Crimson approaches test selection
Crimson strategists run diagnostics on both the SAT and the ACT with you and help you decide which one to commit to, then build the prep timeline around it: your academic profile, your intended major, and the schools on your list. Programs are anchored to a specific test date, so prep runs as a sprint instead of an open-ended block of hours. Across all starting bands, Crimson's SAT program lifts scores by an average of 116 points, and Crimson students have earned 1,733 Ivy League acceptances across the past 11 cycles.
Two scores on two scales don't tell you much. A diagnostic review turns them into a decision.
