The short answer
Colleges treat the two as interchangeable — every school runs a concordance table and reads whichever score you send, with no preference either way. So the question isn't which test colleges like, it's which test your student can actually improve on. Since the SAT went digital-only and adaptive in 2024, that's the ACT: consistent format, practice materials that still match test day, and repeating question types you can drill. Boosted Brains taught both tests for five years and has coached only the ACT since.
Two facts settle most of this, and they point in opposite directions from what families expect.
Colleges genuinely do not care which one
Every college runs a concordance table that maps ACT scores to SAT scores. An admissions reader takes whichever score your student submits, converts it, and evaluates everyone on the same scale. No school prefers one test, and submitting both buys nothing — a 1350 SAT alongside a 30 ACT reads as a 30, not as two good scores.
That’s why the honest version of this question is narrower: which test can your student move the most, in the time they have?
Why the answer is the ACT right now
In 2024 the SAT went digital-only and adaptive. Three consequences, and they compound.
The paper option is gone, so a student who works problems by marking up the page loses that. The test now adjusts difficulty mid-exam based on early answers, which means two students of similar ability sit two different tests and most of them get pushed toward the middle of the range. And the practice materials families already owned stopped resembling the real thing, which is the complaint we heard over and over: the test looked nothing like what my kid practiced on.
The ACT went the other way. It’s the same test for every student, it’s still offered on paper, its question types repeat, and practice materials from past administrations still predict what shows up. That consistency is the entire reason a targeted drill plan works — you can train a pattern only if the pattern holds.
Worth being precise about the claim, because it’s narrower than it sounds: neither test is harder than the other. They’re different in how much a student can move on them. Drill a few hundred ACT questions and your student will recognize those shapes on test day. Drill a few hundred SAT questions and a good share of what they practiced won’t resemble what the adaptive engine serves them.
Nik gave us the analogy we still use. He played basketball, and he said prepping for the SAT felt like taking one three-pointer, then a layup, then a half-court heave: no two reps the same, so nothing ever becomes automatic. The ACT felt like shooting free throws. Same distance every time. He started the ACT at a 24 and finished at a 31.
What the current ACT actually looks like
Worth knowing before you plan anything, because the test changed in September 2025.
Three sections count: English, Math, and Reading. The composite is the average of those three, so each is now worth a third rather than a quarter. Science is optional and no longer feeds the composite — students still get a science score, but only a small handful of schools weigh it, and that list moves from year to year. For nearly every student the right call is to skip it and put that prep into the three sections that decide the number. Whether anything on your student’s college list is one of the exceptions is worth checking rather than guessing, and it’s one of the things we’ll sort out with you in a free consultation. The Writing essay is optional too, no college requires it, and nobody should be taking it.
Math runs through Algebra II and basic trigonometry. There’s no calculus on it. That doesn’t mean waiting until Algebra II is finished, though — English and Reading don’t touch it, so a student still sitting in the class can sprint on those two first and come back for a Math sprint a semester later, with superscoring assembling the results. More on how to time that out.
If you already have a PSAT score
You’re not starting blind. The PSAT is reported on the same scale as the SAT, and ACT and the College Board publish a joint concordance table that colleges use to read the two tests against each other — so a PSAT score converts onto the ACT scale the same way an SAT score does. On that table, a 1000 sits at about a 19. That’s an ordinary score before any prep, and a long way from a 30 without real work.
Use it to size the job, not to pick the test. The test choice is still the ACT for most students; the PSAT number just tells you how many weeks to plan for.
Pick one and go all in
The most expensive version of this decision is hedging. A student splitting months across two formats builds shallow familiarity with both and automatic recognition with neither, and then colleges convert the scores anyway and read the higher one. The student who committed entirely to one test and finished at a 35 is in a different conversation than the student holding two decent scores.
Boosted Brains coached both tests for the company’s first five years. After the 2024 changes we watched score gains on the SAT flatten while ACT gains held, and we’ve been ACT-only since. The longer argument, with the full breakdown of both tests, is in SAT vs. ACT: most families are preparing for the wrong test.
