TLDR: A private equity firm bought the ACT, built a half-assed new testing product, and potentially destroyed its only competitive advantages against the SAT: consistency and reliability.
Karaoke w/ ACT bro
I went to a National Test Prep Association conference in Philly in June, 2024.
When testing nerds get together in one big hotel gallery room under fluorescent lights to talk about testing data and the differences between practice test form codes, things get rowdy.
Drinks started at 5. Shots at 8. My buddy Kate rented an entire Karaoke bar at 10. And there we were: singing Journey with an ACT rep, who, hours before, promised an entire Marriott banquet hall of test prep companies that the ACT wouldn't significantly change.
That was June 2024. ACT had been bought by Nexus Capital Management two months prior, in April 2024.
ACT bro was fired by July. Then, ACT announced they were changing the entire test by September 2025: digital only, science section optional, roughly half the length. Copying the SAT, except without the tools to do it.
ACT as Toyota, College Board as Tesla
Quick summary: the ACT is a smaller company than the College Board, which runs the SAT and AP system.
In January 2024, I was encouraging students to take the ACT over SAT. Choose consistency over radical, cool and new.
The ACT was a Toyota Land Cruiser: reliable, unchanged from year to year, the ride or die test. The testmakers, known as psychometricians, had the test dialed for its use case as a contextual sorting mechanism for college admissions. You knew what you were going to get, you knew the stakes, you knew the curves wouldn't change significantly.
The College Board, meanwhile, was like Tesla. They had a culture of making a bunch of promises, delaying products, messing up curves, sacrificing individuals for the common good but undeniably changing the game.
It was the SAT that started working with Khan Academy, not the ACT. It was revolutionary at the time to democratize SAT practice accessibility.
However, the initial implementation of Khan Academy negatively impacted lots of students because the actual problems were so much different. Hell, they had recruited a 24-year-old me to write problems for Khan Academy based on a single spec sheet with no context. Basically: "Here are some legos. Go build a car."
The ACT, until Nexus Capital Management, would NEVER do that. Their processes were designed for boring precision, not educational revolution. For the test you want to study for potentially multiple months to prep, you want consistency, not radicalism.
This is ironic, given my company's all about educational revolution. Identity crisis, yada yada.
The Bad Guys
Enter Nexus Capital Management. The private equity (PE) bros. Again, these were the guys that bought out the ACT.
Here's the general gist of private equity firms: they’re not all bad, and ultimately they just want to make a buck, like all of us. They’ll buy companies and increase profit by laying off people or cutting costs in other ways, then eventually sell. Sometimes, they’ll sell after they've extracted all the resources they can from a dying company. Other times, they’ll actually try to sell a company for more than they bought it.
In this case, a private equity play seems misaligned with the ACT. Here, they saw the SAT was having success with their digital product, and that the ACT was too slow to adapt. They misunderstood that the value of the ACT was its slowness, that no matter how tech changes in the future there’s always a market for consistency. Again, the ACT were Land Cruisers. They're careful. Their slowness was a feature, not a bug.
Instead of acknowledging that the ACT’s competitive advantage was careful distribution and slow scale, the PE folks who bought ACT decided to copy the SAT.
However, the ACT doesn't know how to experiment, test new stuff. They don't have that culture down like the College Board. They’re like parrots repeating what they hear without actually understanding what it means.
All of a sudden, the company that DOES know how to break stuff, the College Board, is the adult in the room. By process of elimination, the College Board's SAT is better tested, has more materials, better software, and is accepted in its current state by all US colleges.
Now that digital ACT is expected to roll out everywhere in September, I can't confidently say they have it together. With the College Board, there was always a sense they would figure it out, even when they broke things in the short term. With the ACT and their new PE overlords, I don't see that happening anytime soon. I hope they do, because monopolies are a problem. And the College Board is well on its way to a monopoly.
Where We Stand
ACT is in a difficult place right now. Frankly, I don't trust their execution.
We only do SAT Sprints on site in Venice Beach. We'll still do ACT as an online-only, one-on-one only product for us for very specific use cases. While PE plays aren't all bad, their motives for purchasing a company don't always align with the principles of the company they bought. This looks like the case here.
Want clarity on SAT vs. ACT for your kid?
I’ll personally walk you through what I’d do if it were mine.
-- Ravi. Venice Beach, CA