Remember how the whole ACT is changing mid-2025? Well, guess what? The ACT finally released its first practice test in that new format. It came out right before the holidays, in December of 2024. While the ACT website had already told us a fair amount about the new test, this practice test gives us even more detailed insight into the changes coming down the pike.
And today I’m going to break the whole thing down for you, one section at a time, so you know exactly what is different and how it impacts you.
If you’re new to my blog, you might be wondering: who on earth would actually CHOOSE spend their winter break reading over a standardized test with a fine-toothed comb?! Well, I would—because I’m Kristina, the owner and founder of Ivy Lounge Test Prep®, and I’m passionate about this stuff. For the last 15 years, I’ve helped high schoolers all around the globe dramatically raise their SAT and ACT test scores and ultimately get into the colleges of their dreams.
So, are you ready for a ride through the world of the new ACT? Because I sure am.
ARTICLE CONTENTS
1. Watch this article as a video
A. Changes we already knew about
B. New changes that the practice test revealed
A. Different numbers of passages and associated questions
B. New question format (question “stems”)
4. Math section
A. Pacing
A. Number of questions per passage
6. Science
A. A new emphasis on “experiments” questions
7. Conclusion
Watch this article as a video:
Overall Changes to the New ACT
First, let's talk general changes to how the ACT is structured and organized. (I already mentioned many of these in my previous post on the subject. BUT some of the below are also new, as in, not mentioned in that post because no one knew about them before the practice test came out!)
FYI: these new changes will be implemented in April of this year (2025) if you're taking the test online. If you're doing the paper-and-pencil version of the test, your new format will kick in come September of this year (2025).
Big-picture changes we already knew about
First, I’ll remind you of the current version of the ACT—the one you’ll still be taking (if you’re an online test-taker) in February of 2025, or all the way through July 2025 if you are a paper and pencil test-taker:
And here’s the format of the ACT that will kick in this April or September, depending on how you take the test:
What does the ACT practice test reveal about the overall test?
In addition to those major shifts we already knew about from the ACT’s website, the practice test clues us in to another big change that was not mentioned on the website.
Test-wide, the new ACT no longer offers “F, G, H, J, K” as multiple choice answers.
What does that mean, exactly? Well, if you've ever taken an ACT test or practice test reflecting the current/old version of the test, you’ve seen that the odd questions will label their answer options as A, B, C, D (and sometimes) E, while the even questions will offer F, G, H, J (and sometimes) K as answer choices. The ACT powers that be used this system in the hopes that it would prevent fast-moving test-takers from accidentally bubbling in “B for Question 4 when they meant to bubble in “B” for Question 3.
But in this new version of the test—or at least in the online version, which is the one that we currently have access to—we see only A, B, C, and D as answer choices. They do NOT alternate between the subsequent four letters of the multiple choice. So when you take the new ACT and see only the ABCDs, rest assured: you didn't miss anything, and you're not on the wrong question. It’s simply that there are no longer alternating letter sets, at least not if you're taking the test online.
What's on the New ACT English?
Now that we’ve covered the birds-eye view, let's jump into the first multiple choice section that comes up in for both the new and old versions of the test: the English section.
We already knew that the new version would consist of 50 questions in 35 minutes. What does that mean for you? Well, for starters, it means you've got 42 seconds to answer each question as opposed to 36 seconds per question. So you're already getting almost 17% more time. Pretty cool, right?
But there are also two other items that I noticed in the practice test that we were not alerted about beforehand by the ACT website. So you're hearing about them here, first.
Number of passages and questions in the English section
The first change that we weren't expecting is that there are no longer five (5) passages in the English section. This section will actually have six (6) passages, if this recently released practice test is any indicator. (They might publish practice tests in the future that are slightly different! This post just reflects my well-informed projections, based on the data we’ve got.)
In the current version of the test, you get asked 75 questions about 5 passages, so each passage has 15 associated questions.
But the test that they issued in late December instead gives you 6 different passages—some of them with 10 attendant questions, and a couple with only 5 questions.
Specifically, in the practice section that we got to see for English in December, there were:
A 10-question passage
This was followed by a 5-question passage
Two more 10-question passages
Another 5-question passage
One final 10-question passage.
Of course, this won’t necessarily be the exact flow for future tests. But we can certainly speak to some general trends. Namely, the passages seem to have fewer questions associated with them than was the case in the “old/current” version of the test, and the passages vary in length.
So what does that mean for you, timing-wise? Well, if you’re a regular-time test-taker:
If you encounter a ten-question passage, you should be aiming to complete that in 7 minutes.
If you get a passage with only five questions attached to it, you should be finishing that passage in 3 minutes and 30 seconds.
New ACT English question format
Now, this next update blew my mind a little bit—it seriously changes the game, and to your advantage!
As you’ll recall, on the current/prior version of the ACT, most of the questions don't actually ask you a question. They’ll typically just take this form instead, underlining part of the passage on the left and giving you the answer choices on the right:
Granted, there have also always been a handful of questions that ask something like, “The writer is considering adding the following sentence. Should he or shouldn't he?” But these true questions that actually pose a question are/were rare, making up maybe 30% or less of the total test.
Well, they’re not rare for long! On the new version of the ACT, it seems, every single English question has a question stem.
What’s a “question stem,” you ask? By this I mean the actual question, involving the words what/why/how/who/which—and ending with a question mark (“?”)—that they're asking you right before the four multiple choice answers.
Let me tell you: it is groundbreaking that the new test apparently includes question stems for every English Q. Because when the test gives you a question stem, it is in essence telling you which grammar topic or English topic you should be utilizing for that particular question.
Below are some examples of actual question stems from the practice test. I'll show you how, each time, they're literally telling you what aspect of your grammar knowledge you need to be drawing on when you answer.
“Which choice makes the sentence most grammatically acceptable?” This is your catch-all grammar question. Any punctuation would fall under this question, as would subject-verb agreement, adjectives, adverbs, and other topics of that nature.
“Which choice provides the best transition from the last paragraph to this paragraph?” or “Which transition word or phrase is most logical in context?” Folks, do you know what that means? They're literally telling you this is a transition word question! So you won’t get distracted by worrying about, say, whether the relevant sentence’s subject agrees with its verb.
“Which choice most effectively maintains the essay's tone?” Once again, they're telling you the subject being tested in this Q is NOT grammar. Instead, it's a word choice question. Amazing! You don’t have waste time nitpicking adjectives or adverbs or commas.
“Which choice is clearest and most precise in context?” The test is again clearly asking you a word choice question, and one that specifically involves conciseness—so they’re telling you that you need to find a word that fits in the surrounding context AND that is not redundant. Grammar is off the table. It's more about the meaning.
“Which choice is least redundant in context?” This was the English question that floored me the most on the new practice test. The ACT has always asked redundancy questions. But what I found with most students—before I start working with them, that is!—is that they’d get these questions wrong because they didn’t realize that “redundancy” (prose that is overly long or repetitive) was even a problem they should be looking out for!
So those, my friends, are the two additional English section changes you can expect on the future ACT.
What will be different on the ACT Math?
Let’s move on now to the Math section.
Now, the Math topics, categories, and the distribution thereof, will all stay basically the same on the new test. The same math concepts are covered, and you still need to learn the same number of formulas. In short, you still have to do the same amount of work to prepare.
You can still use a calculator. And it’s still the case that no reference sheet is given.
But here’s what will be getting a makeover.
Pace of the Math section
The current ACT asks 60 questions in 60 minutes. That means one minute per question, obvi.
But the new ACT math section only has 45 questions, so, 15 fewer than the previous test. Now, in Fall of last year, those of us in the test prep biz thought you were going to be given 45 minutes to complete the section.
But according to the ACT website, it appears test-takers actually get 50 minutes for this section. That's good news: instead keeping up the same one-question-per-minute pace (albeit for a shorter stretch of time), you’ll actually get a minute and 6 seconds—nearly a minute and 7 seconds, actually!—per question.
New number of answer choices
Buckle up, because this one’s major news.
Previously/currently, in the ACT's Math section, you were provided five multiple choice selections for each question: A, B, C, D, E, or (on even-numbered questions) F, G, H, J, and K.
But with the newfangled practice test, there were only four answer choices per Q. So each question offered only A, B, C, and D as options. (If you’ll recall from my discussion of test-wide changes above, you’ll no longer see letters F through K on alternating questions.)
This is an exciting development for YOU because if you have to guess on a question, you’ll now have a 1-in-4 shot (25% chance) of randomly getting it right, versus what was previously a 1-in-5 shot, which is only a 20% chance.
It also means that if you're using your answer choices to back-solve, you have fewer options to plug in and try. So the new, reduced number of answer choices will save you even more time.
The New ACT Reading
Time to break down the Reading section!
As with the other sections, some things are staying the same for the Reading part of the test:
How many passages you’ll be reading and analyzing.
One of those passages—it isn’t predictable which—will be a “double passage.”
The order of the passage types remains the same. So it’ll still be Fiction followed by three non-fiction passages: Social Science, then Humanities, then Natural Science.
Number of questions per passage will change
As you know from my chart above, the broad strokes of what’s changing in this regard are that the new section contains 36 questions and lasts 40 minutes (if you're a regular-time test taker). That’s opposed to an old/current version of the Reading section, which consists of 40 questions that you get 35 minutes to answers. So what just happened? We lowered the number of questions by four, and we raised the number of minutes by five. Right?
Here’s what that actually looks like:
You’ll be given four passages. That’s no different from the old test.
BUT, in the updated test, each of those passages now has 9 associated questions (instead of the prior 10).
In terms of timing and pacing, you’ve now got 10 minutes to cover one passage’s questions. That’s actually a substantially better situation than you were in before, when you had to complete a passage in 8 minutes 45 seconds, and you had ten questions to do that in.
So, take heart: on the new ACT you should feel a lot more comfortable as far as the time goes.
Annotations on the ACT
It’s my best guess that this particular tweak will apply ONLY to the online test because I just can’t imagine how it would work logistically with the handwritten test. In any case, if you take the new test on a computer, when a question mentions a certain word, phrase, paragraph, or line number from a passage, the testing software will actually automatically highlight that word, phrase, or what have you in the passage itself. So you don't actually have to annotate the passage itself the way you used to.
This innovation might make it that little bit easier to move accurately and quickly through a passage/question.
Future ACT Science Section
Finally, let’s talk Science, the last of the sections that we are going to cover in today's post.
As you’ll recall from my chart above, the new Science section is going to give you 40 questions in 40 minutes. The previous test gave you the same number of Qs (40), but only 35 minutes to do them.
A new emphasis on “experiments” questions
This shift is definitely going to affect some people’s experience of the test. The number of passages and the number of questions per passage, and even the distribution of the different types of passages, are all different on the near-future version of the test.
For a long time—the past decade—there have been:
Six passages total in the science section
Three of these would be “Experiment” passages, with seven questions apiece
Two of them were “Charts and Graphs” passages, with six questions apiece
One was a “Fighting Scientists” passage, asking seven questions
This added up to a total of 40 questions
What's so different about the next version of the ACT is that, based on the practice test we’ve got, students will instead be given:
Seven passages total
Each passage has one fewer question
Four “Experiments” passages instead of just three, and with six questions apiece instead of seven
Two “Charts and Graphs” passages with only five questions each instead of six
One “Fighting Scientists” passage, but now with only six questions
So if you think about that in the big picture: 4 experiments passages x 6 questions = 24 of your 40 questions, or 60% of the section, are now dedicated to “Experiment” passages.
In other words, the basic shift is towards a bigger emphasis on the “Experiment” passages and less of an emphasis on the “Charts and Graphs” passages and on the “Fighting Scientists” passage.
How fast do you have to move in the Science section?
Also, this affects the timing of your passages. Before, when we were doing six passages in thirty-five minutes, we had basically 5 minutes 50 seconds per passage. Now, we have seven passages and forty minutes to do it in, so we get actually get 5 minutes 42.9 seconds. You might be thinking, wait, that's like seven seconds less than I had before!
But remember, the difference is you have one fewer question to answer. So it comes out to roughly the same amount of time per passage, just with one less question to complete. (However, you DO have to task switch one more time because we have seven different passages instead of six.)
Conclusion
Phew! Still with me? What an epic post. But I wanted to make sure I didn’t deprive you of any of the updates that the new practice test revealed…and there just happened to be a LOT!
If you need more help planning for the ACT, especially given all the changes that are afoot, I offer an excellent free workshop called Your Fail-Proof College Prep Plan. Register at that link to demystify the entire standardized testing process! Or, if you’d prefer personalized help, learn about my one-on-one tutoring packages here.
