How the ACT Has Changed

Students frequently ask how much the ACT has changed in recent years and whether the older ACTs that they find online provide good practice for the current exam.

The short answers are "not that much" and "yes they do." The ACT has made some minor tweaks over the last few years, but the types of questions and passages that appear on the older exams appear on the current exams.

The big change on the Reading Test is that every ACT since 2015 has included a dual passage, i.e., a passage made up of two shorter passages offering different perspectives on a particular topic. Dual passages made occasional appearances prior to then, but there aren't many of them on older tests.

At about the same time, the Science Test reduced the number of passages from seven to six. The types of questions and passages did not change.

The mix of questions on the Math Test has gotten harder in the last few years. On the April 2019 ACT, a student could miss thirteen questions on the Math Test and still get a 30. In 2009, the same number of correct answers would only have netted a 27. However, the difficulty of the individual questions hasn't changed much. The hardest questions today aren't much different from the hardest questions ten years ago. It's the ratio of hard questions to easy questions that has changed.

Another thing the ACT has done over the last few years is to include more Statistics & Probability questions on each test. Since 2016, each exam has contained six such questions. Again, however, these questions aren't any more difficult than the ones that the ACT asked before 2016--there are simply more per test.

The section that has changed the least is the English Test. In 2008, the English Test stopped offering "OMIT the underlined portion" as an answer choice. Now, it says "DELETE the underlined portion" instead.

I would certainly recommend doing the most recent tests first, but the older tests are still excellent practice.