Who Put the SAT and ACT in Charge?

In the early years of the Classic Learning Test’s existence, we believed that our fight for acceptance as a college entrance exam nationwide would happen in admissions offices. We were wrong. The legacy tests have lobbied to weave themselves into myriad state government mandates nationwide, making the college entrance exam business as political as it is academic.

Knowing this, the SAT and ACT are lobbying aggressively to try to maintain their political moat. In several states — including Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas, and more —  they’ve hired lobbyists, even if one or both had not previously had one, and worked side-by-side to oppose bills that would merely make CLT legal. Thus, what would otherwise be a relatively mundane conversation between admissions officers and the makers of a newer standardized test is instead a pitched political battle.   

Thus, what would otherwise be a relatively mundane conversation between admissions officers and the makers of a newer standardized test is instead a pitched political battle.   

It wasn’t always this way. When the SAT and ACT launched in the 1920s and 1950s, respectively, they competed in a free market. Both sought to answer admissions offices’ need for an objective measuring stick to assist them in sifting through the rising flood of college applicants in those decades. The SAT took the approach of trying to measure aptitude. The ACT, on the other hand, sought to provide universities with a measure of how much a student had mastered the typical public school standards. Students and admissions offices sought one or the other based on their preference between the two distinct products.

The end of this relatively free and competitive marketplace began in 2001. That year, Congress passed the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act. With that law, the federal government enforced nationwide accountability on public schools via testing requirements, including an English and math test in 11th grade. At the same time, Colorado and Illinois became the first states to require all public high school juniors to take the ACT, paying for the mandate through the state budget.

States initially spent nearly $1 billion creating their own, custom standardized tests to comply with NCLB all while ACT and SAT lobbied more states to mandate their test. Soon, educators started to balk at the time students spent taking redundant tests. High school juniors were forced to take the state NCLB accountability test and the ACT, covering the same subjects, within days of one another.

To relieve the government-created problem, the Obama administration began issuing ESEA waivers for 11th grade testing in 2011 and then passed the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) in 2015, giving states the “flexibility” to adopt a “nationally recognized” assessment as their official, state high school exam. Thus, by adopting the SAT or ACT as the government test, states could officially comply with federal accountability laws, eliminate their often unpopular state tests in high school, and give every student a free, college admissions score.

At first glance, this act of federal bureaucratic beneficence makes sense. But its unintended consequences have been huge.

In the years leading up to ESSA, the ACT had overtaken the SAT as the country’s most popular test. It had secured contracts with more than 15 states, many of them thanks to NCLB waivers, and was a central player in the creation of the Common Core standards. The SAT needed an answer. So, the College Board hired the chief architect of Common Core, David Coleman, who launched a new, Common-Core-aligned version of the SAT in March of 2015.

Thanks to the allure of multi-million-dollar government contracts, both exams had transformed into remarkably similar assessments based on the same standards. And the arena of competition between the two similar products migrated from admissions offices and family rooms to government buildings.

Now, a huge portion of students who take the SAT or ACT don’t do so by choice or to earn admission to college. They take one or the other to meet government mandates.

According to our analysis, more than 800,000 of the 1.38 million students (nearly 58 percent) who took the ACT in 2025 did so because their state government uses it as their government test or to give public schools accountability grades. More than 140,000 will soon add to that tally as the Illinois state government switches from the SAT to the ACT this coming school year. For the SAT, the number is approximately 640,000 of the 2 million students who took it last year.

But it doesn’t stop there. With the SAT and ACT intertwined with federal assessment mandates, state lawmakers began to put their product names into state laws governing numerous other state policies. These include publicly funded scholarships, graduation testing requirements, state accreditation programs for private schools, and even school choice programs.

In Georgia, for instance, the state law governing the publicly funded Zell Miller scholarship, which pays 100 percent of in-state tuition for tens of thousands of students, names specific SAT and ACT scores. In North Carolina, the state tied school choice program dollars to the ACT. Ohio’s school choice program requires private schools to use the SAT or ACT if they don’t want to use the public school test. The list goes on, in nearly every state. 

If the Trump administration is serious about “returning education to the states,” the U.S. Department of Education could issue ESSA waivers that go beyond those issued by the Obama Administration.

If the Trump administration is serious about “returning education to the states,” the U.S. Department of Education could issue ESSA waivers that go beyond those issued by the Obama Administration. A few states have already drafted waiver requests that would allow for menus of assessments, giving students choices based on their goals after their impending graduation. By approving these, the administration would simultaneously return a key part of state education policy to the states, give students and families more choices, and undo the federal origins of the SAT’s and ACT’s political moat.

Whether or not that happens, though, we at the CLT will continue going state-to-state to request that lawmakers stop protecting the SAT and ACT by name in law. And we have no doubt that those two legacy companies will use every ounce of their considerable lobbying power to ensure that politicians shield them from competition. 

Michael Torres is director of legislative strategy at Classic Learning Test.