The Complete Guide to Official SAT and ACT Practice Tests

What practice tests are available? Which ones should you use? And how should you use them?

Available Practice Tests

The College Board and the ACT offer a variety of official practice materials, including full-length practice tests, sample questions, and interactive tools.

While some of these resources require money and/or registration, many of them are free. You can also find unofficial practice tests online or in prep books.

In this guide I’ll go over all the available practice options and explain which ones you should use and why. I’ll also give you my best suggestions for how to make the most out of each test.

There are many real, official SAT and ACT exams available for practice! These tests are great for getting comfortable with the format of the exam and for testing out your new knowledge. You can find links to all of these tests below, as well as some tips on how to use them.

There are two types of official practice exams: those released by the test makers (the College Board for the SAT and ACT, Inc. for the ACT), and those released by other companies that have received permission to republish official tests. The main difference between the two is that test makers’ official exams can be taken under timed conditions, while third-party exams often cannot.

khanacademy.org/sat

collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/practice/full-length-practice-tests

princetonreview.com/college/free-sat-practice-test

actstudent.org/sampletest

actstudent.org/onlineprep

With the advent of new, free practice tests from Khan Academy and the College Board, students now have more opportunities than ever to access free and official practice exams. Many test-takers have multiple tests at their disposal, and often wonder which ones they should use to prepare.

In this post, I’ll describe all of the practice tests available for each test, as well as how I suggest using them.

We have now added the most recent practice tests to our growing collection of SAT and ACT practice tests.

ACT Practice Test is a test formed by the contents of the ACT test. It is designed to help you familiarize yourself with the ACT and its format. Many people take the ACT Practice Test to help them prepare for the official ACT. The practice test may be helpful because it allows you to see what kinds of questions are asked on the test, as well as how much time it takes to answer them.

The ACT practice test differs from other exams you take in school in that it is not graded. Also, the official ACT is administered under strict conditions and scored by professionals, but your ACT practice test can be taken at home and scored by you. It does not matter if you get a question wrong or how fast you answer it; what matters most is that you understand why it was wrong and/or why it took so long to answer so that you can do better when preparing for the official exam.

We at Compass are often asked which ACT practice tests are the best to use in preparing for the ACT. While we have our own preferred practice tests and resources below, we thought it would be helpful to compile a comprehensive list of all of the officially released ACT tests online.

For each official test, Compass has provided a table with key information and links to download the PDFs. We also link to our articles with detailed analysis of each of these tests. Many of these tests include commentary from Compass consultants about their strengths and weaknesses as well as answer keys and scoring guides.

In general, we recommend that students take at least eight full-length practice tests before taking the actual ACT, in order to get comfortable with the test format and timing. The following tests can help you achieve this goal:

* Official ACT Prep Guide 2016-2017 (7 practice tests)

* Official ACT Prep Guide 2018-2019 (4 practice tests)

* 10 Real ACT Tests (10 practice tests)