Re-ACT: State’s return to ACT is ‘disappointing,’ says New Trier asst. superintendent

Incoming juniors and seniors are in for a big change as Illinois is returning to the ACT in spring 2025, leaving the SAT by the wayside.

The Illinois State Board of Education’s contract with College Board, the nonprofit that administers the SAT, lapsed on June 30, which led ISBE to open the bidding and solicit proposals from testing companies during its routine procurement process. 

In May of this year, ISBE awarded a six-year, $53 million contract to ACT as the official provider of the Illinois accountability assessment required for graduation.

Dr. Peter Tragos, the assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction at New Trier, told The Record that ISBE’s decision is “unfortunate” and “disappointing” as it undoes a lot of the work and professional learning that districts across Illinois have done to align their curricula with the SAT suite of assessments.

“In terms of standardized tests, I’m not so wedded to only the SAT or ACT,” Tragos said. “It’s much more, to me, about consistency so that districts have longitudinal data on which to build and design curricula, and we lose that longitudinal data when we go back and forth between standardized tests. … Consistency benefits students the most, [and] test familiarity is a real advantage in standardized test-taking.”

Tragos and Dr. Paul Sally, New Trier’s superintendent, were among the educators who wrote letters to Dr. Steven Isoye, chair of the Illinois State Board of Education, and Dr. Tony Sanders, state superintendent of education, advocating that the state renew its contract with College Board to maintain consistency and preserve the work districts have done in making the progress toward curriculum alignment, particularly through the aforementioned longitudinal data available to them with the SAT suite of assessments. 

Districts across Illinois will now have whole swaths of students who are unfamiliar with the ACT.

The SAT served as the official state exam for eight years, meaning schools were using the full SAT suite of assessments to help students build familiarity with the test format, administering the PSAT (or, Preliminary SAT) to ninth- and 10th-graders. The class of 2026 took the PSAT 8/9 in ninth grade, the PSAT 10 in tenth grade, and will now take the ACT in spring 2025 having never seen ACT prep in the classroom.

Schools will no longer be administering the PSAT 8/9 and PSAT 10, and Tragos said District 203 would like to adopt the ACT suite of assessments, which currently are not as “robust” as the SAT suite of assessments, in the future. Township High School District 113 (Deerfield and Highland Park high schools) also plan to transition ninth- and 10th-graders to the ACT suite to prep them for the test.

Because the ACT has a science section, students across the state will no longer take the Illinois Science Assessment. Students will still take the PSAT/NMSQT in October and future years as it is the National Merit Scholarship Qualifying test for which students can be recognized as finalists and semi-finalists at the national level.

Just as Illinois schools maneuver the changes, Tragos anticipates ACT will quickly adapt and, he said, be “frankly somewhat more similar to the SAT.”

The PSAT and SAT have been in digital, adaptive formats, with this generation of students (as Tragos calls them, “digital natives”) most familiar with online testing. The ACT, on the other hand, is also available online.

For out-of-classroom test takers, ACT plans to shorten its three-hour exam, too, from the “classic ACT,” which includes English, reading, math and science, to the “core ACT,” which eliminates science and only includes the English, reading and math sections. The essay portion will remain optional. 

Tragos said he does not want to overstate how much the district’s curriculum is aligned to the SAT suite of assessments either. 

Professional organizations across the state are preparing learning opportunities for district leaders and content area leaders. At the district level, professional learning opportunities are also being organized as educators reacquaint themselves with the ACT and freshly acquaint themselves with the revised format. 

“It is a change that is not easily maneuvered, but we will adapt, and we’ll do what we need to do at New Trier to ensure our students are prepared for the ACT, that our teachers are prepared to align curriculum to the ACT and that we have supportive measures for students who are not on-pace to meet those benchmarks,” Tragos said.

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