Mandated, optional, digital, adaptive, streamlined, swapped.

All of these adjectives can be used to describe elements of the Scholastic Aptitude Test, commonly referred to as the SAT, and the American College Test, or ACT.  However, with the high rate of change college admissions tests have experienced in recent years, it can be difficult to keep up with which tests these words apply to and in what ways.

One of the most local changes that has occurred was the shift from the SAT to the ACT being provided in school in the spring of 2025. Chair of the Lane Tech Counseling Department Meredith Bantz said that this shift occurred because “the state of Illinois pays for the students throughout the state to take a standardized test,” and when this contract expired, “the contract was renewed with ACT, not SAT.” 

In a weekly message, State Superintendent of Education Tony Sanders said technical specifications and commitment to diversity are two of the highest weighted considerations in procurement decisions, but the SAT and ACT were found to be similar on each front. 

According to the Illinois State Board of Education’s website, affordability and the fact that the ACT includes a science section were deciding factors since this science sanction exempts Illinois Juniors from needing to take the federally mandated Science Accountability Assessment. With these benefits in mind, a six year contract with the ACT was struck.

Bantz said that Lane has retained the ability to provide additional standardized tests such as the Practice SAT, or PSAT, which is a decision that all teachers vote on at the beginning of each school year. 

“When students take the PSAT in 11th grade, it’s for national merit qualifying purposes, and we want to be sure that we give our students that opportunity. So that’s why we still provide that, and or that’s why I always vote yes,” Bantz said. “Otherwise, if students want to qualify for national merit, they would have to find a different school that would allow them to test at their school.”

Lane’s Director of Assessments and Programming Julio Izguerra said that another reason the PSAT has continued to be provided is for the sake of underclassmen. “Just so they have practice for those types of assessments,” Izguerra said. “So that way when they are juniors, they have already done it before.”

Izguerra said that the transition from the SAT to the ACT went relatively well on the school’s end, except for a network error. “If you were a junior last year, we had the issue April 18th where the ACT servers could not handle the amount of logins that the district was providing. So on their server end, there was an issue where they didn’t allow us to connect to it. So they corrected it. They offered a retake. They offered free vouchers for you to retake it in the summer, I believe, on a Saturday,” Izguerra said.

The main issue with this was that students who took or had partially completed the ACT in school were working with a different version of the test than those who had to take it outside of school at a later date.

“What you guys took on the Saturday was the ACT national,” Izguerra said. “So it’s slightly different. The ACT national was the enhanced version, which is the newer version, which I hope we’re going to go to this coming spring, which does not include the science and I think writing either. So it’s actually shorter. So it doesn’t take as long. It has less questions. It gives you more time to answer those questions because it’s a shorter test. So the district one we took last year was the regular, the previous version.”

In reference to the new model of the national ACT, Izguerra said, “science is optional.”

Indeed, according to the ACT website, “Students can now choose to take the ACT National Saturday test with or without the science section.” However, according to the ISBE website, the Illinois State Board of Education has opted to include both science and writing as required sections in the Spring 2026 statewide administration of the ACT.

Bantz explained that this may continue to be beneficial for students’ college applications. “If it’s something you want to pursue in college, then I think it would make sense to take that portion to show that you have that skill set and can score well there,” Bantz said.

“They also reduced the answer choices for math,” Izguerra said. “Before, they would give you five choices. I think now they give you four.”

Edwin Gustinskas said that the PACT he took this fall, which emulates the old version of the ACT, was “just so fast, and there’s so many questions.” Likewise, Senior Zoie Kitson said that the first time she took the old ACT, she “definitely ran out of time on a bunch of sections.” Recognizing that this was a common complaint, the ACT said on their website that they reduced the length of the test by 44 questions overall. 

Izguerra said that this has improved the testing experience because “It just kind of speeds up the exam to make it easier on students so they don’t have to sit there as long. So it’s about 75 minutes shorter. If the district decides to take the enhanced version, that’s the difference they will have this school year.”

According to the SAT website, this test has also undergone substantive structural changes. The test fully transitioned to a digital format with adaptive questions in March of 2024, meaning that a students’ performance in the first module of a section determines the difficulty of the second module. Additionally, test duration was reduced from approximately three to two hours, reading passages were shortened, and students can expect to receive their scores sooner after test completion.

For students in the midst of curating their college applications, these changing test elements may have large impacts, especially as more and more colleges shift back to test required. 

Bantz said that “it seems like schools like Ivy League schools and really highly selective schools are trending towards shifting back to requiring tests, with the exception of UChicago and California schools — which were both, even pre-pandemic, finding that the test score wasn’t something that they thought was necessary for admissions. But yeah, otherwise I see the Ivies, Georgetown, all leaning back towards requiring a test again.”

Elaborating on the conditions of this trend, Bantz said, “I think there’s gonna be a huge portion of schools in that mid-range selectivity that stay test optional because they’re finding that it isn’t a huge factor in their admissions and that they’ve been getting a good quality of student without it.”

While colleges do consider submitted test scores in admissions, Izguerra said, “they just use it as [part of] an overall review of everything, which is your GPA, how rigorous your curriculum was while you were here, extracurricular activities, if you’re part of the newspaper, stuff like that. They just kind of want to filter out students that don’t meet their benchmark. That way they can pick the students that they feel like do meet that and will succeed at their school.”

Regardless, both Bantz and Izguerra said that Lane has and will continue to provide students with the resources they need to be well prepared for these tests.

Bantz said that Lane administration does “encourage teachers to give some prep, especially leading into the months like up to winter break and after winter break, leading into the spring.”

Sophomore Ryan Cale said that this review has been provided in his English, trigonometry, and chemistry classes. “They’ve given me like grammar based questions, punctuation, and then my chemistry class gave me stuff about reading tables,” Cale said. 

In-school support is provided outside of classes as well.

“Last year we had ACT prep classes. I believe it was after school and before school,” Izguerra said. “Students could sign up for ACT prep and it was before school started. So if you wanted to come in a period before and stay a period after, they did offer that.”

Students can look out for this sign-up in the winter as a way to prepare for the in-school ACT and PACT in the spring of 2026.