Do Schools Prefer the ACT or SAT?

Back in the day, when I worked with many high school students interested in going on to college, I would often get asked whether colleges and universities were more likely to prefer the ACT or SAT standardized exam.

The students knew that a solid score on one of these exams could make getting into their college much more accessible. But which one did colleges prefer?

And this was a fair question. 

The SAT
The first SAT, Scholastic Aptitude Test, the exam was administered in 1926. Carl Brigham created the SAT when asked by the College Board because they wanted to gauge whether students were ready to proceed to college. It wasn’t long before colleges, starting with Harvard, would offer scholarships to those who scored the highest on the SAT. 

It took a few decades before the SAT became more prevalent, with most colleges asking students to take the exam. While each college would appropriately weigh a student’s scores from their high school courses, they figured a comprehensive exam that helped ascertain cognitive reasoning strength could reasonably determine intelligence for hundreds of thousands of students at once. Thus all the students would be weighed equally. It was comparing apples to apples. The 2022 SAT Suite of Assessments Annual Report showed that 1.7 million students took the SAT at least once during the 2022 school year. This was up from the previous year of 1.5 million. 

The ACT
Professor Everett Franklin Lindquist from the University of Iowa believed that the SAT needed some competition. He felt he could create a better exam that would test what the students had learned in school. 

The American College Test, the ACT, started in 1959 and was touted as an alternative to the SAT. Plus, it was the first standardized exam to include a science section. In 1959, 75,460 students took the ACT exam. During the 2022 school year, 1.35 million students took the ACT at least once. 

So Which Standardized Exam Do Colleges Prefer?
The truth is that most colleges don’t have a preference on which exam the students take. The critical issue is that the individual student attains a high score on either exam. And with the SAT and ACT being different in several ways, there is a solid chance that a student will do better on one than the other. 

Because of this, a student would do well to take each exam at least once and see which test they were stronger on. Then the student can send their highest score to their college of choice and leave their other lower score in a desk drawer, never to be opened again! 

Seek Out Help From the Professionals
Here at iAchieve, we pride ourselves on being one of the top test prep providers. We have professional tutors specializing in the ACT and SAT and can work with students in person or remotely, and we offer so much more.

Our test prep packages will provide you with a textbook with over 800 practice problems, access to more than 1,500 online practice problems, more than 100 hours of video solutions to the exams, and practice tests for either exam with detailed analysis. An excellent score could change a student’s future, so preparing for the SAT or ACT with professionals is a worthy investment. 

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