If you’re wondering what your ACT plan calendar should look like, in this blog, I’m going to talk about when you should take the ACT and what a good ACT calendar looks like. Some other questions I’ll talk about: When is it too early to take? When is it too late? What are deadlines that you need to be aware of? And what’s going on with the enhanced ACT?
First, let’s talk about when the ACT is offered. Generally, the majority of students who take the ACT take it in one of two different ways. The first way is the school day test. A school day test is a test that’s offered by your high school or district. You don’t get to pick that date. They pick that date, and there are certain test date ranges and test dates that are available for schools and districts to choose from. And so you take the test on one of these dates, and you take it during school. The other way that you can take the ACT is on a national test date. National test date ACTs are what you sign up for on the ACT website as an individual that might be at your high school, a hotel, or somewhere else. But essentially you sign up, and you usually take it on a Saturday, sometimes on a Sunday. School day tests may be offered in October or February and online only in March and April. And national test dates are offered in February, April, June, July, September, October, and December.
Note that New York does not offer the July test. The Truth in Testing law in NY states that standardized tests must release a certain number of standardized college entrance exams for students to see after they take those exams. ACT was not able to get an exemption to offer the exam in both February and July without releasing the exam — so the July ACT is no longer offered in New York. In some years, New York has also not offered the February exam. Rules may be different for the digital exam, so this is subject to change. SAT has an exemption in place for this situation. The July ACT tends to be hard to find test locations for in general, so keep that in mind. There may or may not be a test location near you in July if you live in a rural area.
Most students take the ACT sometime between the summer before junior year and the fall of senior year. Can you take it other times? Maybe in some cases. For example, for athletic recruits, I generally recommend that they take their first test latest by June of sophomore year because recruiters might start asking for scores that summer. Likewise, there are some conditions in which students will take the test later. Let’s say they’re going to a school with automatic scholarships. If you hit a particular ACT score and they haven’t hit that score yet, I sometimes see students then take the test in February or even April of senior year because they’re just trying to get a scholarship. The next question I get is, how early is too early to take the ACT? As a general rule of thumb, I don’t want to see people taking the ACT before they’ve completed geometry and algebra 2. Both of those math topics are very highly represented on the ACT. Trying to learn them outside of a classroom environment can be a lot, and it’s generally not worth it unless you’re an athlete. So I don’t recommend that you jump the gun if you’re still completing those classes. In most cases also, students perform better on the ACT when they have more experience reading, problem-solving, and learning. So, the later you take the test in your high school career, the higher your score.
My next tip is to take the test when you have time to prepare for it. Now this is different for every student. You might be on the softball team and have softball season, so that’s probably a bad time to take the ACT. If you have an off-season, that is probably a better time. One of the most important factors in your ACT score is you putting in time before that test date. I generally recommend a runway of 6 to 12 weeks leading into that test date with two to six hours per week dedicated to ACT prep. I know that’s a lot, but you can handle it.
The other thing that I like to say is plan to take the ACT two or three times. A lot of students think they’re going to take it senior year right before the deadline, but that can be really problematic. In general, I sometimes like to have my students calendar out the ACTs so they take it multiple times in a row. That way, we can sandwich the prep all in one segment, and they’re not feeling like they’re prepping for the ACT forever. It’s really annoying to take the ACT in April and then plan to take it again in September and then again in February, because you’re stretching out your testing timeline. So, I usually like to pick three dates in a row. Maybe that’s July, September, and October. For the ACT, maybe it’s February, and then maybe you have a school day test in March or April, and then you can take the April exam. So one of those kinds of calendars is good. We try to cluster them together to make it a little bit easier, but you don’t have to cluster it together.
The other thing that I like to say is I recommend that your first ACT be taken no later than July before your senior year. That’s because I want you to have three opportunities to take the ACT, and I want you to have a fourth test date in the mix available in case something goes awry. It is not uncommon to see ACTs completely canceled or pulled because of cheating scandals. Students get sick; maybe they get strep throat or COVID or something the day before the exam, or they have a stomach flu. Whatever it is, you want to have a little bit of a cushion because this is so important. You want to make sure that you have your test done by the deadlines. And in order to do that, you want to build that runway. So July of senior year is the last date to start, or even earlier is good too. It’s even better if it’s April or June or something earlier that gives you a little bit more time.
So, what is the deadline? When do you have to take the ACT by? The first college admissions deadlines that I usually see for schools start around October 15th, 16th, or 17th. UT Austin, Georgia Tech, University of Georgia, UNC Chapel Hill, and early action deadlines tend to be mid-October. If you want to apply to those schools early action, you need to have your ACT done by September of senior year so that the score is ready to send. The majority of colleges and universities that have early action or early decision have a November 1st deadline. And for that deadline, you typically—though not always—can submit the October ACT exam. But you have to double-check with them because sometimes that October score isn’t released until a few days after that deadline. To be ultra safe, the September test is the last test date for early decision and early action, but the October test date might be accepted. Check with the schools to make sure.
One more tip: Take the paper ACT if available, even if that means you have to sign up for a national test date instead of just the school day test. Your school may be offering the ACT on a computer, and if it is, heads up. The curve on the computerized test is a little bit more harsh than the curve on the paper test of the exact same tests. And part of the reason for this is that they found in studies when students are given on-screen reminders that they’re running out of time, they pay attention to them more, and they tend to fill in all the bubbles so that they get partial credit on those ones they’re guessing on at the end. They’ll fill in because you’re not penalized for wrong answers. So, it’s always good to put an answer for every question on the ACT, and they found that students did that more often on digital tests, and that resulted in higher scores, and so they adjusted the curve accordingly to mitigate that effect. If you’re a prep student, you’re going to be the person that fills it in whether you’re on paper or whether you’re on a computer, so all you’re getting is a score dock because you took it digitally. That’s why I recommend you take it on paper. The other reason I like paper is that studies have shown that most students focus better on reading comprehension when they do things on paper. I mean, every student is different, and maybe you do better on computers. Students feel like they do better on computers, but studies have shown that they actually don’t necessarily unless. There could be some cases, but in general, I and other professional tutors generally recommend that you take the test on paper, and that could affect your scoring.
The other thing is when you go to sign up for the ACT, you now have to select which type of test you’re going to take, the digital or the paper, and there may be availability for one or the other and not both. More often, there is more paper availability than digital availability, or there has been so far. I’ve also heard stories of a lot of students signing up for the digital and then getting shuttled back into a paper exam. So be aware that might happen to you too.
Finally, let’s talk about enhanced ACT. The ACT is rolling out something called the enhanced ACT in 2025. And what that means is that the test is changing. Ultimately, they’re giving you more time per question, reducing the number of questions per section, and making the science section optional. This enhanced ACT is now available in digital format. Supposedly, though, a lot of people are getting their tests canceled and reverted to paper as of April 20, 2025, but it will roll out in paper as well on national test dates in September of 2025. So if you want to take the old-fashioned ACT, it’s time to register ASAP because there are only two regular old-fashioned ACT test dates on paper left: June and July of 2025.
Why would somebody want to take the old version of the ACT? Well, there’s a lot more prep material available in that format. So, you can get your timing down, you can get your pacing down, you know exactly what you’re up against, and it’s not fun to be a guinea pig. So for that reason, a lot of students want to try to get in that old ACT if they can this June or July. That being said, I do have some students who are younger that think they’re not going to be able to necessarily get to the score they want in that amount of time, and they might wait until September so that they know they can take the enhanced test. But here’s the other curveball: if you’re going to be taking the school day test, that test will not become the enhanced test until next spring. If your school, for example, offers an October school day test, that will not be the enhanced test; that will be the old-fashioned ACT. So just so you know what you’re studying for, it’s up to you about which version of the test you want to take.
And finally, one last thing I want to mention is some students have asked me if there is a particular ACT where the curve is better or where you can get a higher score. The only thing I’ll say to that end is I do find sometimes that students I work with when they take the school day test than when they take the national test. And that might be the pool of students who are taking those school day tests that are incorporated into the equating. I’m not 100% sure. But rumor-wise, otherwise, I don’t necessarily have a single test date where I’ve seen all my students doing way better if they take it in July versus if they take it in December or something like that. I’ve seen hard tests on many different test dates. So, I don’t have any conspiracy theories for you guys, and all of that was hearsay, so I wouldn’t necessarily trust it. I hope this was helpful!
