During the pandemic, the SAT and ACT, which teenagers have dreaded for generations, attracted tremendous attention.
In response to this uber-stressful period, most private and state universities and colleges dropped their standardized testing requirements. Teenagers across the country celebrated the move, and elite and highly selective schools were inundated with even more applications from students who thought they now had a chance of admission.
If that’s the last news you’ve heard about the SAT and ACT, you’ve got a lot of catching up to do.
The standardized tests themselves have changed in dramatic ways for test takers, creating more questions for anxious families and opportunities to succeed. The 2026 landscape has moved away from the one-size-fits-all test and embraced a system in which students must be much more strategic about what and how they test.
Why should financial advisors care about either of these tests? Doing well on the SAT or ACT, as well as knowing when to submit or not submit scores, can significantly impact what price a college will ultimately offer your clients.
Five Things to Know About the New Testing Environment
Here are five things you should know, including what happened to that test-optional phenomenon.
1. Elite and some highly selective schools did a 180 on the test-optional offer. These schools concluded that they needed students’ test scores to determine if a teenager had the academic chops to attend an academically demanding school. In this time of grade inflation, schools discovered that grades alone didn’t cut it.
The Ivy League schools, along with other heavy hitters such as MIT, Caltech, Stanford and Johns Hopkins, reinstated the testing requirement, and so have some sought-after public flagships such as Ohio State, Michigan, Purdue and Georgia Tech. What is important to understand, however, is that more than 2,000 private and public institutions remain test-optional.
You can find out which four-year schools are test-optional at FairTest.org. When students aren’t sure if their scores would help or hurt their chances if submitted, they should contact the respective admission offices.
2. This spring, the ACT introduced its biggest changes in decades. For starters, its latest version now includes the option to ignore the science portion of the ACT. This will be a massive relief for many students who aren’t planning on majoring in a STEM field or are pre-med.
The science test is a stand-alone section and will not affect a student’s overall composite score, which tops out at 36.
Of course, this new flexibility is also generating anxiety for those who wonder if avoiding the science section will jeopardize their admission chances. If a school says the science test is “recommended,” I’d strongly suggest that the institution is telegraphing that you better not skip it.
I’d recommend that teenagers take the science section at least once. If they score well, they can potentially boost admission and aid chances. If they don’t, they can elect not to report that specific sub-score to schools that are truly science-optional, while still keeping their composite score intact.
Students might want to contact schools on their list to ask about their policy regarding the optional science section.
3. Another big ACT change is introducing its online test. The College Board made the SAT exclusively digital in 2024, but the ACT will still give test takers a paper version option. A big plus for the online ACT, which the SAT also offers, is that online test takers can use an embedded Desmos calculator, which should make calculations much easier.
4. The SAT can claim the most dramatic change in the standardized testing world.
The digital SAT was shortened, which made every question weighted more heavily than ever. But what was remarkably different was the College Board’s implementation of a two-track system for test takers.
Students who do well with the first set of questions in the math section and the reading & writing section are now steered to harder questions in the second module. Those who do poorly with the first questions, will be fed easier questions.
Those who successfully tackle the more difficult questions in the first sections will be the only ones who have a chance at earning higher SAT scores.
Students should prioritize accuracy over speed in the first modules. A few careless mistakes early on can accidentally funnel a student into the lower difficulty second module, making it mathematically impossible to achieve a top-tier score, even if they get every subsequent question right.
5. The SAT has been exclusively digital since 2024 and while there are countless resources to prepare for the test, the College Board’s testing app (Bluebook Exams) provides full-scale practice tests with the routing system built in. Students taking the ACT can find practice test resources at ACT.org.
