The New York Times warns that "Students Are Finding New Ways to Cheat on the SAT":

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Three years ago, after nearly a century of testing on paper, the College Board rolled out a new digital SAT.

Students who had long relied on No. 2 pencils to take the exam would instead use their laptops. One advantage, the College Board said, was a reduced chance of cheating, in part because delivering the test online meant the questions would vary for each student.

Now, however, worries are growing that the College Board’s security isn’t fail safe. Fueling the concerns are what appear to be copies of recently administered digital SAT questions that have been posted on the internet — on social media sites as well as websites primarily housed in China.

The SAT leaks dominated the conversation in November at an international education conference in Seville, Spain, according to Angel B. Peréz, the head of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

“It was the talk of cocktail parties at the international high school conference,” Dr. Peréz said in an interview. “I had a few counselors come up to me to say, ‘we are very concerned.’”

The College Board was alerted to the cheating efforts by an SAT tutor, according to emails obtained by The New York Times. “This is not a matter of one compromised form. It is a multiyear breach of active test material, accessible on a global scale,” the tutor wrote to the College Board in November, according to the emails.

The tutor, who works with students at a prestigious European boarding school, asked The Times not to be identified, fearing harm to his students and school. But after reviewing leaked questions, he said he concluded that at least some of them were authentic.

One of the sites — bluebook.plus, an apparent knockoff of the official College Board platform, Bluebook, used to administer the actual test — posts what it says are practice tests that students can pay to access. But some of the questions appear to be real, possibly providing questions that ultimately may appear on a student’s actual exam.

In November, bluebook.plus, which appears from domain name searches to be based in China, had 875,000 visitors, according to an analysis by the web traffic site Similarweb.

The bluebook.plus site did not respond to an emailed request for comment.

The College Board said in written statements that SAT cheating is rare, affecting only a fraction of 1 percent of its test scores, and noted that overall test scores have remained steady after the transition to digital tests. “However, some students will always be tempted to cheat on high-stakes assessments, and bad actors are persistent. We stay hypervigilant,” it wrote.

The College Board also acknowledged that, “in certain international markets, bad actors have long made concerted efforts to access and share test content (as well as fabricate content) in order to take advantage of anxious students and parents.”

The organization has taken steps to make cheating on the digital test more difficult. The exam is adaptive, meaning that test-takers who perform well early in the exam receive harder questions as they go along. And the College Board says the tests are drawn from a pool of “several hundred thousand” test items.

In addition to having human proctors present during testing, the SAT’s Bluebook platform requires that other apps on a student’s computer be turned off.

But the organization acknowledged that it was aware of “screenshots that purport to have been taken while testing is in progress” as well as “hardware and software-based efforts to evade our security system.”

A variety of coding and SAT “prep” websites discuss ways to bypass Bluebook security. One way is to use a plug-in that seems like a mouse, but is, in fact, a video capture device.

Rob Franek, editor in chief of Princeton Review, a publishing and test preparation company, said there has been cheating “since these tests were invented,” adding, “certainly, the digital versions were not spared.”

The fact that students are permitted to use their own laptops is one weak link that several experts flagged.

In some cases, metadata showed that questions were posted online almost instantaneously after the test — creating the possibility of “time zone cheating,” in which test takers in a later time zone can gain access to the test questions before their test begins.

Test questions also have been sold on Telegram, a Dubai-based platform, and posted on Scribd, a subscription digital repository of data. Students have also circulated questions among themselves on Google docs, the European tutor said. Many of the tests have been removed from Scribd, apparently at the College Board’s request. A spokesman for Scribd, based in San Francisco, said the company responds to valid requests to remove copyrighted material.

But the College Board has been unable to fight bluebook.plus, according to an email exchange with the College Board that the tutor shared.

“We did go through the legal process to request a takedown, but as is often the case with international sites, we didn’t get a response,” wrote a College Board security official, Michael Thiel, responding to the tutor.

Mr. Thiel added: “Some of what’s posted may be real, some isn’t, but none of these sites have all the SAT questions.”

 
The Washington Post examines developments in the commercial battle between the SAT and the ACT, and changes that ACT Education Corp. has made to its test to match those made to the SAT:

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As more college applicants decide to take entrance exams and elite schools return to pre-pandemic norms to require the SAT or ACT, students face a key question: Which test should they take?

Overwhelmingly, students have picked the SAT in the past few years, making it the most popular standardized test for U.S. high schoolers applying to college. Among the class of 2025, 45 percent more students took the SAT than the ACT, numbers reported by the testing companies show.

As it attempts to claw back market share, the ACT has made key changes in the past two years that are helping to reshape college entrance exams. It has gone through an ownership change, replaced its chief executive and revamped the test, addressing complaints that the old test took too many hours. Company executives said they are already seeing positive results.

“Our numbers are growing substantially,” said Catherine Hofmann, a senior vice president for the ACT Education Corp., the Iowa company that owns the test.

The optimism comes after a long slide in popularity, financial questions and concerns about the test’s future.

A decade ago, more graduating seniors took the ACT than the SAT. But the SAT edged past the ACT in 2018 after a significant redesign and has since widened its lead. About 47 percent of U.S. students who graduated high school in 2025 took the SAT, compared with 36 percent who took the ACT.

The shift comes as col¬lege enroll¬ment hit a 10-year high in the fall and more stu-dents are report¬ing test scores for admis¬sions.

Both the SAT and ACT aim to measure students’ core verbal and math skills. But there are notable differences that students and states consider when choosing between the two. The SAT is now exclusively digital, and adaptive, asking harder or easier questions based on how students do at the beginning to try to more precisely gauge performance.

The ACT offers both online and paper versions and is linear, asking a series of questions regardless of how students perform early on.

Then last fall, the ACT shortened the core part of the test by 50 minutes to 2 hours and 5 minutes — nine minutes less than the SAT. The company also expanded the availability of electronic versions of the test, and gave schools and students the option of whether to include the science section.

“They are trying to ratchet back some of their share,” said Rob Franek, editor in chief of the Princeton Review, one of the country’s largest test preparation companies.

The ACT also became part of a for-profit venture — unlike the SAT.

The non-profit that long administered the test, ACT Inc., struck a deal in 2024 to sell its testing operations to a private equity firm, Nexus Capital Management of Los Angeles.

The sale came after ACT made several rounds of job cuts and reported more than $113 million in losses from fiscal years 2019 to 2022 before turning a profit again in 2023. As part of the deal, ACT changed its name to Intermediaryed and retained an almost 20 percent stake in a new holding company for the tests, called ACT Education Corp.

Some advocates raised concerns about the ownership shift, even though many textbook companies and other education firms are for-profit.

“Private equity’s core obligation is not to students, families, or educators, it’s to investors seeking maximum return,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, which represents 1.8 million union members. “That creates a dangerous misalignment.”

Harry Feder, executive director of National Center for Fair & Open Testing, also known as Fairtest, which scrutinizes standardized tests, said the new owner could ultimately decide to get rid of the ACT test altogether if it doesn’t prove sufficiently profitable — “leaving no competition in the market.”

Without competition, Feder said it’s possible the College Board, which administers the SAT, could decide to boost test fees and be less responsive to concerns by students and high schools. “We have antitrust laws for a reason,” he said.

But Hofmann, the ACT Education executive, said the new owners gave it access to additional resources and said the company is solidly in the black. It also offers other products, such as career assessment tests, that broaden its portfolio.

“We are not going anywhere,” she said. “We are financially stronger.”

Hofmann also said the testing operations have retained the people who worked there when it was owned by a nonprofit.

“We are still the same assessment company,” she said. “We have the same mission.”

 
Inside Higher Ed asks: "Will the Classic Learning Test Shake Up College Admissions?"

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Beginning next month, a new test will join the SAT and ACT as an admissions option for prospective students applying to the United States’ elite service academies: the Classic Learning Test, an up-and-coming exam that focuses on passages from the Western canon. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth lauded the test in a post on X last May, writing, “The CLT is the gold standard, and our academies need to attract the very best.”

Being embraced by the military was a major win for the young test, which was founded just over a decade ago in Annapolis, Md., minutes from the U.S. Naval Academy. For years, it was relatively niche, serving primarily as an academic progress exam for private classical schools, an educational movement that promotes the study of classic Western literature and other liberal arts. Some colleges and universities allowed it as an entrance exam, though many were test optional, meaning a student could submit their CLT score if they felt it bolstered their application.

That changed in 2023, when the State University System of Florida’s Board of Governors began accepting the CLT—in addition to the better-known SAT and ACT—as an admissions exam for its public universities, which all require test scores for admission, as well as for its flagship Bright Futures scholarship program.

Now, more than two years later, Arkansas and Oklahoma have followed suit, allowing submission of the CLT for admission to their public institutions, and students in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Wyoming can submit CLT scores for state merit scholarships. In addition, the University of North Carolina System recently began accepting CLT scores for students who meet a GPA threshold. The test has also become a darling of the conservative right, whose members argue that it is more rigorous than its competitors and can “restore merit” in higher education.

“While the SAT and ACT measure reading and math skills, the CLT gauges student critical thinking ability and knowledge by incorporating texts from classical works of literature and history into the reading comprehension sections,” wrote Jonathan Butcher and Lindsey Burke, directors of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, in a September op-ed urging Hegseth to accept the test at the military academies.

But the test has its fair share of critics. While some question its focus on the classical Western canon, which often excludes most nonwhite, nonmale writers and thinkers, others take issue with the quality of the test itself. The College Board, the nonprofit behind the SAT, has argued that the CLT and the SAT are not comparable exams, as CLT claims; it has also criticized what it describes as CLT’s lack of test security.

The test has also faced major criticism from the College Board, which argues that the CLT’s studies showing the test is concordant with the SAT are inconclusive. (In testing, concordance is the ability to map the scores from one test onto another, similar test, such as a 1400 on the SAT being equivalent to a 31 on the ACT.) According to Priscilla Rodriguez, senior vice president of college-readiness assessments at College Board, the SAT and ACT have long collaborated on their concordance studies to share data with one another and ensure students take the tests fairly close in time to one another. But the College Board didn’t play a role in the CLT’s concordance study, which included some self-reported SAT scores rather than official scores for every participant.

The CLT has fought back against those criticisms, saying their report meets the industry standards of a sound concordance study. They also completed an internal study verifying the self-reported data, Noah Tyler, the CLT’s chief financial officer, told Inside Higher Ed. He said that the SAT, ACT and CLT were once planning to work together on a concordance study, but the project got delayed. Since then, the College Board has been “completely nonresponsive” about moving forward with the study. (A College Board spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed the organization would be open to conducting such a study with the CLT once its other concerns about the test are addressed.)

Rodriguez also noted concerns about the security of the CLT, which students can take at home and is not proctored live. It has a 12-hour testing window, which she said opens the doors to students who take the test earlier in the day sharing questions with other test takers.

College Board experts have also criticized the math section of the CLT as being “considerably easier” than the SAT’s, omitting what Rodriguez described as “pretty foundational math skills from the areas of Algebra 1 and Algebra 2, data analysis and statistics.”

Tyler pushed back on both counts; while it’s true the test doesn’t use live proctors, students are recorded taking the test and those videos are all reviewed, he said. The company also uses an answer-matching software to ensure students aren’t sharing answers.

He also said that the test’s math portion may seem easier because the test has chosen to include questions focused on students’ grasp of things like the logic of math and the properties of numbers.

The test’s reach is likely to expand. Texas passed a bill last year that was supported by the CLT to study which college entrance exams should be used by universities in the state, with the results expected in August 2025.” Republican lawmakers in several states, including Indiana, have already filed bills in their current legislative session to accept the CLT at public universities.

 
As indicated above, legislators in Indiana are moving toward allowing the Classic Learning Test to be considered in college admissions along with the SAT and ACT:

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Indiana lawmakers have advanced a bill that could lead to more high school students taking the Classic Learning Test instead of the SAT or ACT for college admission.

If passed, SB 88 would require the state’s public colleges and universities to consider scores on the Classic Learning Test, or CLT, the same way they would consider SAT or ACT scores for admission. The CLT asks students to analyze pieces from “texts that have had a lasting influence on Western culture and society.”

In addition, SB 88 would also allow prospective teachers in an alternate licensing pathway to submit their test scores on the SAT, ACT, CLT, or GRE in lieu of taking a licensing exam.

The testing change would be a boon to the growing number of students in private schools in Indiana, advocates said, as well as home-schooled students for whom the remotely proctored CLT is more accessible than the SAT or ACT, which must be taken on-location at a testing site.

The CLT has been a more accurate assessment for students at the Redeemer Classical School, a Christian microschool in Fort Wayne, said the school’s headmaster, Nathaniel Pullmann at the Wednesday hearing. The school teaches classical literature, science, and math, including works by Homer, Shakespeare, Newton, and Euclid, he said.

“If this bill is passed, the colleges in Indiana will find the same thing that hundreds of other colleges have found, that it is, in fact, a good predictor of educational success,” Pullman said. “The idea that including the works of the Western world as the reading samples that we’re going to use to assess their reading ability from, the idea that that’s discriminatory somehow, is just absurd.”

Critics have raised concerns about potential cultural bias in the test, which asks students to answer questions about passages from both religious and secular texts by writers like Rudyard Kipling, Plato, Cicero, and Thomas Jefferson, as well as more recent nonfiction articles.

Others pointed out that the bill’s aims originate from model policy language put forth by groups like the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization of conservative lawmakers.

“Why should Indiana accept a bill that has been cut and pasted from various outside think tanks?” said Russ Skiba, professor emeritus at Indiana University, and founder of the University Alliance fo Racial Justice.

The bill does not mandate that universities consider any test scores for admission. And most Indiana public colleges and universities are test optional, meaning students can choose whether to submit their SAT and ACT scores as part of their application. All Indiana University campuses follow this policy, as does the University of Southern Indiana, Indiana State University, and Ball State.

Nine private colleges and universities in Indiana currently accept CLT scores — though some of those schools are test optional as well. Service academies also recently announced they would accept the test scores.

 
US News has released data on the US colleges and Universities that had the highest SAT scores among newly enrolled students.

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Despite the prevalence of test-optional and test-blind policies, many admissions experts suggest students still take the SAT or ACT if the school accepts scores – unless there are financial or logistical barriers – since it can be a positive addition to their application. Among data reported by 583 colleges to U.S. News in an annual survey, the following 21 schools boasted the highest composite median SAT reading and math scores for fall 2024 entrants. Score submissions at these schools ranged from 26% to 83%, meaning many new entrants submitted no standardized test scores at all, ACT scores, or scores from an alternative to the SAT or ACT such as Advanced Placement or International Baccalaureate exams – a policy known as test flexible.

 
The expansion of AI use has reached into the SAT test prep industry:

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Private tutoring for important tests like the SAT’s can run in the hundreds, even thousands of dollars.

Now, AI-fueled programs are leveling the playing field, offering an effective tool for a fraction of the cost. 7NEWS Here to Help looked into how AI is changing the test prep industry.

New AI programs are looking to offer that personal tutoring feel, without the high cost.

Khan Academy, which has free basic SAT prep, now offers an AI add-on called Khanmigo for just $4 a month.

Dr. Kristen Dicerbo said it can supercharge studying and help students get unstuck.

“So, it’s basically enhancing that practice that we know is so important…We have designed it to mimic the kind of experiences that a student has if they are sitting next to a human tutor. What would that human tutor do in that situation, and that’s what we have guided Khanmigo to do.”

Students can text-chat with the Khanmigo assistant. It offers everything from hints on questions to step-by-step instructions on how to tackle difficult questions if you need help. It can also assess what you did wrong and offer more questions based on incorrect answers.

Still, knowing some students need in-person motivation, another option is a tutor who offers digital/AI resources with extra one-on-one tutoring where needed.

Leia LeMaster Horton, a member of the National Test Prep Association, said her program, Horton Test Prep, has a digital platform with an AI component that costs $25 a month, per subject.

“I have a wonderful math software program that uses AI to identify the problems that a student misses. What I love about it, it’s adaptive in nature, just like my practice tests are, and just like the real SAT is adaptive in nature. But the software program, if the student misses the problem, I absolutely love this, 4 or 5 questions later, it asks the exact same questions again but this time it switches out the numbers,” LeMaster Horton said.

Large platforms like Kaplan and Princeton Review also now offer AI tools and in-person courses.

 
Google's Gemini program is also getting into the SAT tutoring space. The company announced that it will be providing free full-length practice SAT exams.

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Standardized tests are often a critical component of the college application process. To support high school and college prep students during these critical milestones, we’re launching practice tests in Gemini: full-length, on-demand practice exams available at no cost. Available now, practice tests support the SAT to start, with more tests coming in the future. To try it out, tell Gemini, “I want to take a practice SAT test”.

To ensure they prepare you for the actual exam, we have grounded practice tests in rigorously vetted content from leading education companies like The Princeton Review, to build a best in class experience for learners coming to Gemini. This helps ensure that you’re not just practicing — you’re preparing with material that more closely resembles what you’ll see on test day.

When you complete a practice test in Gemini, you’ll receive immediate feedback highlighting where you excelled and where you might need to study more. For anything you don’t understand, you can ask Gemini to explain the correct answer. By helping you identify specific knowledge gaps, Gemini empowers you to turn those insights into action — creating a customized study plan that can help you walk into your exam with confidence.