Why Do Most Public High School Students Default to Taking the SAT without Considering the ACT?

Since the SAT announced it was changing in 2014, my tutoring practice received a spike and subsequent sustained swell in ACT tutoring requests. This shift in demand from SAT tutoring to ACT tutoring has been mostly driven by students in private schools. The initial spike was precipitated by legitimate concerns about the risks of taking a new test. Simply put, college admissions test scores are used by admissions office algorithms to help determine the likelihood that a prospective student will succeed at their institution, succeed afterwards, and donate back to the school. Admissions algorithms use comparative data from past students to try to determine the likelihood of this ideal outcome. Scores from a new SAT wouldn’t offer the same value as an indicator of these outcomes without years of data from past graduates to support it. Recognizing how this could be perceived as a drawback by colleges, approximately 90% of my private school students and 50% of my public school students opted to take the ACT in 2016—up from only about 10% in both demographics in previous years. However, over the coming years, requests for ACT tutoring remained high only among private school students, while public high school students and their parents returned to pre-2014 levels of demand.

My private high school students are often encouraged to take a practice ACT and a PSAT in school. They are also more likely to have a test comparison workshop at their school that covers the details of both exams. Public school students, however, tend to only be exposed to the SAT through a free PSAT early sophomore year, and the College Board’s marketing efforts to regain market share from the ACT in their schools.

It is in the interests of all students to expose themselves to both the SAT and the ACT to make an educated decision on which exam best suits their test-taking abilities. At the very least, public and private high school students should take an SAT reading comprehension and no-calculator math section, as well as an ACT science section. These sections account for the majority of the difference between the two exams. Students can then analyze their missed questions to decide on which test they are likely to earn a higher score.

Click Here to Watch a 6-minute MINI-LESSON to HELP YOU CHOOSE BETWEEN the SAT & the ACT