What’s Changing with the New, Enhanced ACT Test in 2025

In July of 2024, the ACT announced that it was planning to radically alter much of its test. This means that students who are planning to take the 2025 or later need to become familiar with the new, Enhanced ACT changes in order to ensure the best scores possible.

Why is the ACT changing format?

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the ACT had planned to make some changes to its testing strategies, where students would be able to take 1-3 sections at a time rather than sit for the test all in one go, but the subsequent lockdown made these planned changes take the backburner.

Furthermore, in the last two years, the SAT has undergone a major overhaul to streamline the test and make it more accessible to students. Now, the ACT is moving to align its notoriously long and difficult test likely in part to be more in-line with the new Digital SAT. 

Officially, the ACT has cited a goal of “offer[ing] students more choice and flexibility in demonstrating their readiness for life after high school,” as the reason for the changes. 

How is the Enhanced ACT changing in 2025?

OK, so the ACT wants to be “more flexible” and offer “more choice,” to students–what does this mean in practice? Well, let’s take a closer look at the actual changes happening to the Enhanced ACT in 2025.

The main decisions regarding the new ACT 2025 seem designed to give students the option to not take sections that might not relate to their interests and strengths, and to generally make the test shorter, while giving students more time per question.

How Long is the New, Enhanced ACT?

The main question on many students’ minds is: “how long is the new ACT?” Often, the length, even more than question difficulty, is the main obstacle to students performing well on standardized tests. Remaining focused and engaged for four hours is no easy task, and even students with strong testing stamina have been known to falter when it comes to the ACT.

Let’s remind ourselves what the old ACT looked like, in terms of length (both number of questions and time limit).

Old ACT Test Format

One of the reasons why the ACT was a notoriously difficult test was because it had a fairly grueling length, more than three hours, including the optional essay. Similarly, the high number of questions meant that students had to keep up a fairly quick pace throughout, especially in test sections that require the reading of long passages. 

New ACT 2025 Format

The old ACT clocked in at 3 hours and 5 minutes for the mandatory sections (including the experimental 5th section) and about 3 hours and 45 minutes if students completed the optional essay; the new ACT is only 2 hours and 5 minutes for the mandatory sections. 

Like the new Digital SAT, although the length of the ACT has significantly decreased, the time students have per question has actually increased, since there are significantly fewer questions as well. This means that students don’t need to keep up quite the same brutal pace that the ACT was known for. 

Perhaps most significantly, the Science section of the test is now optional. For many years, the ACT has had the reputation for being the college-preparedness test favored by students who plan to go into STEM fields, partially because of its mandatory Science section. The SAT has no direct equivalent of this section, meaning that if students want to show off their science prowess, they have to take the ACT. Now, however, the test seems to be shifting to make more space for students who don’t have a strong science background, while still providing options for more science-minded students.

It’s important to note that students now have a lot of freedom to design their own ACT–they can decide to take neither of the optional sections, only one of them, or both. Before students sign up for the new ACT, they should really consider where their strengths lie and what they want to highlight about themselves to the admissions committees of the colleges they plan to apply to. 

How are the English and Reading New, Enhanced ACT Sections Changing?

Unlike the SAT, which only has one English section with grammar, writing, and reading comprehension questions all mixed together, the ACT has two separate ELA sections. The first (which is the first section students see when they take the ACT) and longer of the two is called the English section, and focuses largely on Standard English Conventions (grammar rules) and best writing practices. The second (which is the third section students see when the ACT) is called the Reading section, and focuses on reading comprehension questions. 

Length of English and Reading Sections in the New, Enhanced ACT

The first change is that both sections have fewer questions on the new ACT than they did on the old; the English section is going from 75 questions to 50, the Reading section is going from 40 questions to 36. For the English section, this is accompanied by a shorter time limit, from 45 minutes to 35 minutes. In the Reading section, however, the time limit has actually been raised, from 35 minutes to 40 minutes. 

But, the overall outlines of the sections are not the only things that have been changed. For both sections, there are fewer questions per passage in the new ACT than there were in the old ACT. 

Length of Passages in English and Reading Sections in the New ACT

In the old ACT, the English section had 5 individual passages, and each passage had 15 questions. Based on the one official practice test that has been released, there will be approximately 6 passages on each test, and each passage will have either 5 or 10 questions

In the released practice test, there are 4 passages with 10 questions and 2 with 5 questions. It’s possible that this is how each ACT English section will look on the new test, but it is also possible that the configuration of passages changes from test-to-test (for example, 5 passages each with 10 questions, or 7 passages, 3 with 10 questions and 4 with 5 questions). Although most sections of the ACT have a set number of passages, this is not always true: the old Science section had either 6 or 7 passages, though it always had 40 overall questions.

What we do know about the new English ACT passages is that the passages with 5 questions are slightly shorter than the ones with 10: if a passage has 5 questions, it tends to clock in at just around 185 words, whereas passages with 10 questions are closer to 320 words on average. 

In the old ACT English section, passages were an average of 330 words long. This means that an average English section had a total of about 1,650 words across all of its passages, which is exactly equivalent to the average in the newly released practice test. This might suggest that all English ACT sections will resemble that one exactly–4 longer passages and 2 shorter ones–though again, there is no way to know for sure. 

The Reading section is seeing far less change when it comes to the new ACT; it will still have 4 passages, but each of these passages will have 9 questions each instead of 10 questions each, as it was on the old ACT. There might be some small changes to average word length: on the old ACTs, the average number of words per passage was ~785, and based on the one released reading section of the new ACT, the average number of words per passage is ~830. 

Content Changes of English and Reading Sections in New, Enhanced ACT

Now, let’s delve into changes in the content tested on the English and Reading sections in the new ACT. It’s important to note that there has been nothing published yet about changes in the content to the ACT, that being said, we can make a couple of assumptions based on the released practice test.

Overall, there have not been many content changes for either section, that being said, based on the released questions, there are fewer Conventions of Standard English questions (or what we might think of as grammar/punctuation questions). 

Changes in Question Reporting Category ACT 2025 English Section

In addition, each question will now have a question stem (or a standard line of text asking a specific question). Previously, the ACT english section used a system of numbered underlines in the passage that related to question numbers. While this system will still be used (just with highlights instead of question numbers), now it will always be accompanied by question instructions, most commonly “What choice makes this sentence most grammatically acceptable?”

Grammar questions on the old ACT:

Grammar questions on the new ACT: 

Like the English section, the Reading section of the new ACT is largely unchanged as far as content is concerned. Based on the released questions, however, there seems to be a slight shift in what question categories appear the most; on average, there will be slightly fewer Key Ideas and Details questions, and slightly more Craft and Structure questions and Integrating Knowledge and Ideas questions.

Changes in Question Reporting Category ACT 2025 Reading Section

How is the Math ACT Section Changing?

Out of all the ACT sections, the Math section is getting perhaps the most comprehensive overhaul. Not only is it shrinking significantly–with 15 fewer questions–but the questions themselves are changing as well. 

Traditionally, one of the distinguishing features of the ACT Math section is that multiple choice questions have five options instead of four, as is more common for standardized tests. This was one of the reasons the Math ACT section was considered harder than the SAT’s math section, despite the fact that 25% of SAT math questions are full-in while all of ACT math questions are multiple choice. 

Now though, the ACT is changing its math questions to only have four answer options–great news for students guessing on questions, since it will increase chances of getting questions right from 20% to 25%. That being said, the ACT has said that it plans to eliminate what was the most obviously incorrect answer from the answer options, so this change might not be as helpful as some students might hope. 

Still though, it seems indisputable that as far as format is concerned, these changes have been designed to make the test easier: not only has the time per question increased (from 60 seconds per question to about 67 seconds per question), but students will have fewer answer options to consider in that time. 

Content, however, is a different matter. In addition to the format changes, the ACT has announced some fairly significant changes to the content distribution in the Math section. Overall, more math questions will be testing harder concepts and fewer questions will be testing easier concepts. On the old ACT, the Math section was divided into 60% high-school math concepts and 40% pre-high-school math concepts (that is, more basic concepts). The new ACT changes that split to 80% high-school concepts and 20% pre-high-school concepts.

Changes in Question Reporting Category ACT 2025 Mathematics Section

This means that students will likely need all the extra seconds per question that they can get! It is likely that the ACT Math section’s difficult reputation will remain intact, especially when compared to the SAT’s math section. 

How is the Science ACT Section Changing?

Finally, let’s consider how the ACT’s Science section is changing. The most important change is that this section will be optional. It is possible, however, that some schools (especially ones that are more STEM focused) may require students applying to take this section. 

This also means that the Science section will no longer be factored into students’ composite scores; instead, students who opt-in to take the Science section will get a discrete Science score. 

Beyond that obvious change, the other notable change is that the Science section is actually getting longer–at least when it comes to the test’s time limit. On the old ACT, students had to answer 40 science questions in 35 minutes, and now they will have 40 minutes to answer the same number of questions. 

Like the other test sections, there have also been some slight shifts to the Science section in terms of frequency of reporting category. In the New ACT 2025, students might see slightly more questions in the Interpretation of Data category, and slightly more in the Scientific Investigation and Evaluation of Models, Inferences, and Experimental Results categories. Of all the sections, however, the Science section has seen the fewest content shifts, and it is likely the new Science section will fairly closely resemble the old Science section.

Changes in Question Reporting Category ACT 2025 Science Section

Other changes to the Enhanced ACT in 2025

In addition to all the changes on each section of the ACT, there is one other notable change on the test as a whole: there will no longer be a mandatory 5th section containing experimental questions (that is, questions that will not count toward a student’s score, but that the ACT is gathering data on). 

While it is necessary for testing companies to collect data on potential questions before they put them in official tests (it is a good way of knowing that a question is fair, that it tests what the test-makers are aiming to evaluate, that there is nothing confusing or unclear about its wording, etc.), this 5th test section was far from ideal. 

Students who faced this section (it didn’t appear on every ACT, but was mandatory where it appeared) saw 20 minutes added to their already extensive testing time. Furthermore, since this section always appeared 5th, students knew that it was an experimental section that didn’t count toward their score, meaning it is highly likely that students did not try especially hard on it. Thus, we can speculate that the data the ACT collected was likely subpar and incomplete, reflecting students not putting in their full effort. 

Now, the ACT’s strategy for testing experimental questions is more in-line with that of other standardized tests like the SAT. They will sprinkle experimental questions that don’t count toward a student’s score throughout the test. Since students won’t know which questions are experimental and which ones aren’t, they will have to put forth full effort on every question. 

How is the New, Enhanced ACT 2025 Scored?

Now that we’ve gone over how each section will change, let’s briefly discuss how the new ACT will be scored. 

Largely, scoring will remain the same. Students will still receive 1-36 scores for each section they completed, as well a 1-36 composite score that averages their sections scores to assess how well the student performed on the test as a whole. Unlike in past years, the Science section will not be factored into this composite score. However, as is the case now, students will still receive a STEM score, which is an average of their Math and Science section scores. 

Similarly, students will also still be able to superscore their tests (meaning that they will be able to send colleges their best scores in each section, regardless of whether they were earned on the same test), though it’s important to note that not all colleges will accept ACT superscores. 

How to Take the New, Enhanced ACT

When Can You Take the New ACT?

Students who choose to take the ACT online will begin seeing the new ACT in April of 2025. Those who choose to take the paper-and-pencil version of the test will not begin seeing the new test until September of 2025. 

This means that if students are planning to take the ACT between April-September of 2025, they will have to factor in which version of the ACT they’d prefer to take when they are deciding whether to take it digitally or not. 

How to Opt-In to the Optional ACT 2025 Test Sections

Students who are interested in taking one or both of the optional ACT sections–the Science and Writing sections–will have to sign-up for these sections before they sit down to take the test, though they don’t necessarily have to be added when students register for their preferred test date/time. Rather, students will have until the late registration deadline (typically one week before their test date) to add or remove these optional sections.

In order to add (or remove) these sections to a testing date, students will need to login to their accounts on ACT’s website. It’s important to note that each of these sections is associated with an additional testing fee, $25 for the Writing section and $4 for the Science section. 

That being said, students who are interested in receiving a fee waiver still can, and the process for that remains the same. See the ACT’s website for more information regarding waivers. 

New, Enhanced ACT Test Practice

Here at Piqosity, we are dedicated to providing students the most up-to-date ACT practice to help them achieve the highest scores possible when they take the test. At the moment, our Enhanced ACT course is under construction, in order to get our materials in-line with the new ACT standards.

We expect our Enhanced ACT materials to be available for students to practice with by the time the first new ACTs are being taken in April 2025. In the meantime, we encourage students to continue to practice with our old ACT material, and simply be aware of what kind of changes are coming. 

Other Educational Resources from Piqosity:

• It’s Time to Talk About ACT Timing Tips
• Which States Require the Digital SAT or ACT
• Books to Read for SAT and ACT Test Prep
• Should I Take the ACT or SAT?
• Free ACT Official Practice Test PDFs and Answer Explanations