I frequently find myself helping students choose between the SAT and the ACT (or both), and I am often astonished at the sheer quantity of misinformation out there.  The most common piece of misinformation is that colleges prefer one test to the other.  This is blatantly false.  All 4-year U.S. colleges accept and give equal consideration to both tests.

While the SAT vs. ACT topic is far from uncharted territory--just try googling “SAT vs. ACT”--most articles on the topic dwell on structural differences between the tests, such as length of sections, math content, and the ACT Science section.  Yet, high school students and their parents tend to have little inherent interest in these structural characteristics.  The question that students (and presumably, if you’re reading this article, you) really want answered is “Which test is better for me?”