ACT Section Breakdown 2025: What’s Changed in the Enhanced Digital Version
The first digital administration that will reflect the changes will occur on the April 5, 2025 National testing date. Paper-and-pencil tests will still feature the old format at this point. Starting in September 2025, however, both the paper-and-pencil and digital versions of the test will reflect the newer timing, format, and composite scoring conventions of what the ACT organization is billing as their “Enhanced ACT.”
How Long is the New, Enhanced ACT?
The main question on many students’ minds is: “how long is the new ACT?” Often, the length, even more than question difficulty, is the main obstacle to students performing well on standardized tests. Remaining focused and engaged for four hours is no easy task, and even students with strong testing stamina have been known to falter when it comes to the ACT.
Let’s remind ourselves what the old ACT looked like, in terms of length (both number of questions and time limit).
Old ACT Test Format
One of the reasons why the ACT was a notoriously difficult test was because it had a fairly grueling length, more than three hours, including the optional essay. Similarly, the high number of questions meant that students had to keep up a fairly quick pace throughout, especially in test sections that require the reading of long passages.
New ACT 2025 Format
How are the English and Reading New, Enhanced ACT Sections Changing?
Length of English and Reading Sections in the New, Enhanced ACT
The first change is that both sections have fewer questions on the new ACT than they did on the old; the English section is going from 75 questions to 50, the Reading section is going from 40 questions to 36. For the English section, this is accompanied by a shorter time limit, from 45 minutes to 35 minutes. In the Reading section, however, the time limit has actually been raised, from 35 minutes to 40 minutes.
But, the overall outlines of the sections are not the only things that have been changed. For both sections, there are fewer questions per passage in the new ACT than there were in the old ACT.
Length of Passages in English and Reading Sections in the New ACT
In the old ACT, the English section had 5 individual passages, and each passage had 15 questions. Based on the one official practice test that has been released, there will be approximately 6 passages on each test, and each passage will have either 5 or 10 questions
In the released practice test, there are 4 passages with 10 questions and 2 with 5 questions. It’s possible that this is how each ACT English section will look on the new test, but it is also possible that the configuration of passages changes from test-to-test (for example, 5 passages each with 10 questions, or 7 passages, 3 with 10 questions and 4 with 5 questions). Although most sections of the ACT have a set number of passages, this is not always true: the old Science section had either 6 or 7 passages, though it always had 40 overall questions.
How is the Math ACT Section Changing?
Out of all the ACT sections, the Math section is getting perhaps the most comprehensive overhaul. Not only is it shrinking significantly–with 15 fewer questions–but the questions themselves are changing as well.
Traditionally, one of the distinguishing features of the ACT Math section is that multiple choice questions have five options instead of four, as is more common for standardized tests. This was one of the reasons the Math ACT section was considered harder than the SAT’s math section, despite the fact that 25% of SAT math questions are full-in while all of ACT math questions are multiple choice.
Now though, the ACT is changing its math questions to only have four answer options–great news for students guessing on questions, since it will increase chances of getting questions right from 20% to 25%. That being said, the ACT has said that it plans to eliminate what was the most obviously incorrect answer from the answer options, so this change might not be as helpful as some students might hope.
How is the Science ACT Section Changing?
Finally, let’s consider how the ACT’s Science section is changing. The most important change is that this section will be optional. It is possible, however, that some schools (especially ones that are more STEM focused) may require students applying to take this section.
This also means that the Science section will no longer be factored into students’ composite scores; instead, students who opt-in to take the Science section will get a discrete Science score.
Other changes to the Enhanced ACT in 2025
In addition to all the changes on each section of the ACT, there is one other notable change on the test as a whole: there will no longer be a mandatory 5th section containing experimental questions (that is, questions that will not count toward a student’s score, but that the ACT is gathering data on).
