What Happens When Test Prep Tutors Take the Real SAT and ACT

by Eric Hahn

A little-known fact, outside of test prep circles and fantasy football leagues seeking a last-place punishment, is that adults can take the SAT and ACT. Not just a practice test, but a true official test at a high school on a Saturday morning alongside high school students.

At Premier College Prep, we’ve always placed a high value on getting comfortable with the realistic test experience. This goal is why we run proctored tests every weekend and strongly encourage our students to attend as often as possible.

So we felt it was important to take the actual SAT and ACT to understand exactly what taking the real thing looks and feels like.

Past Test Experiences

There’s some history here. I (Eric) have taken the actual tests a couple times as an adult: an ACT in 2012 and an SAT in 2016 when the scale changed from 2400 to 1600. With the SAT going through another overhaul in 2024 that included a switch from paper to digital, and ACT going through a hasty overhaul in 2025 without much advance public information, we were ready to sit for the exams again.

Taking the ACT

In October 2025, our Director of Test Prep Colin and I sat for the actual ACT at Conestoga High School. This was only the second time the overhauled ACT had been offered on paper, and we were eager to learn more. While the ACT has not always allowed adults to test, a new partnership between the National Test Prep Association (of which we are active members) and the ACT ensured we could test with no complications.

The redesigned ACT debuted in September 2025. It was a hasty rollout, and the ACT did not produce a significant amount of practice test material for it—they simply repurposed a lot of old ACT tests—leaving us wondering about the nuances. Would the new ACT be as easy as the practice tests, or harder? Would the extra time per question (one of the major changes) lead the test to feel more comfortable, or would it remain a heavily speeded test (i.e. you need to work really fast to finish in time)?

Taking The SAT

Since the SAT is the more popular test in the Northeast, we were even more committed to the SAT experience. Our entire team of tutors, plus our Enrollment Director Shannon, registered to take the December SAT. We were eager to experience the digital test firsthand. We also wanted to corroborate (or disprove) the claims from many students, both ours and across the world, that the actual SAT always feels harder than the 7 official Bluebook practice SATs. Is the SAT actually harder and we need to take Bluebook results with a grain of salt? Or are students simply feeling the anxiety and strain of a test that counts?

What We Learned

ACT Lessons

Here’s an extensive primer on the 2025 ACT overhaul—and our initial skepticism surrounding the test. The short version is this: the ACT was historically a relatively simple but very fast test, very challenging for students to finish within the time limits. The primary change to the ACT gave students more time per question, leaving us assuming that the new version must contain either 1) more difficult questions or 2) a tougher scoring scale (i.e. each missed question costs a student more points).

We learned from the October ACT that the ACT content has gotten harder. The English questions are more challenging and the Math questions are more challenging.

The ACT is still a very fast test. Despite the greater time per question, students still need to work at a very quick pace to complete the test in time.

There were a lot of small content lessons that we won’t bore you with here, but which our tutoring team has been discussing frequently and which will be implemented to help students have every possible chance of improvement.

SAT Lessons

We answered our primary question: Is the real SAT significantly more challenging than the Bluebook practice tests?

The answer is No. Every tutor agreed that the test felt exceptionally similar to the Bluebook tests, in both content and difficulty level. We received different questions (more on that in a moment), but my SAT Math section, in particular, was notably easier than many of the Bluebook tests.

The SAT experience challenged one of our prior assumptions: that every student who takes the test in a given month receives the same test (excluding variation of field test items and adaptive sections). When students (and test prep professionals) talk (afterwards) about a specific test date, there’s discussion of “June 2025 was a good month for high scorers,” “the August 2025 data questions were brutal,” “the last 4 math questions were manageable in March 2024,” etc. The implicit assumption is that all students are receiving the same test. Given that we had a team of tutors taking the test and that our tutors are all professionals who received the upper modules, it was pretty easy for us to determine that we did not all receive the same test. It seems most likely that there’s a bank of 2-4 tests worth of questions, and each student receives a (somewhat) unique mix of those questions.

Will this lesson impact the way we teach? Not particularly. But it will impact how we talk with students and parents following test dates. No test date has ever been predictably easier or harder than any other. If anyone ever told you, “you’ve gotta take it in ____ month, that’s the easy one,” they’re wrong. But in the past, we could have at least retroactively searched for patterns. Knowing how many different variations there are, seeking patterns is futile.

Test-Taking Lessons

We learned a lot about the test-taking experience in general that we’ll be sharing with students. Some highlights:

The instructions aren’t always clear. On the SAT, at the very end of the setup process, the proctor gives students a code to enter. As soon as students enter it, the test begins. Yet, the proctor’s instructions are not particularly clear about this, leading to some students confidently entering the code and beginning, while others wait, expecting a clear “Begin.” This means students in the same room can be on different times, with the break beginning for some students before others.

Implementation of policies varies tremendously. Some proctors collect phones, others don’t. Some proctors (ACT) write Start and Stop times on the board, others don’t.

Distractions are inevitable. Okay, we knew this already, and it’s why proctored practice tests are critical so students can get used to maintaining focus while sniffles, coughs, and pencil taps go on around them. On our SAT, a clanging radiator and ambulance sirens were the distractions of the day.

So, How Did We Do?

Our goal in taking this isn’t to get perfect scores ourselves; it’s to learn as much as possible about the experience to help our students maximize their scores.*

For example, I missed two easy questions on the ACT. I had no clue why I chose what I chose. While I’ve been tough at times on students in the past who missed similarly baffling questions, I developed a new level of empathy. On a test with 171 questions, careless mistakes can happen.

Plus, a tutor’s ability isn’t about their scores. I’ve interviewed tutors with high 1500s who couldn’t teach at all. Alternatively, I’ve hired tutors with scores in the 1300s and 1400s who were phenomenal tutors, able to connect with students of all levels. Test prep is not about what a tutor can do on the test; it’s about what a tutor can help their students do.

*That said, we did pretty well. Eric and Colin both scored perfect 36s on the ACT. Every one of our tutors scored in the 1500s on the SAT.