The testing giant ETS announced Tuesday that it will acquire college and career-readiness assessment company ACT—a move that could eventually have implications for the roughly 1.38 million students who take the ACT’s college entrance test, and the 17 states that use the ACT as an official state assessment.
Both testing organizations have a large footprint in K-12 education.
In addition to its college entrance exam, ACT also offers WorkKeys, a career-readiness assessment and credentialing system. The organization also conducts research into college readiness. The ACT was previously owned by private equity firm Nexus Capital Management.
ETS, an assessment nonprofit, is the nation’s largest provider of teacher-licensing tests. The Praxis exams, used in 46 states to gauge teaching skills and subject-specific content knowledge, are part of its suite of products. The company also offers K-12 assessments.
What does the acquisition mean for students and schools?
“In the near term, it’s business as usual,” said Amit Sevak, the CEO of ETS. For students who are registered to take the ACT test this year, for example, nothing will change about the questions or the administration.
But there may be transformations further out on the horizon.
“We’re going to be sitting down with the ACT leadership to … talk about, ‘What does the country need right now?’” Sevak said, and to define a new product roadmap that focuses on “long-term trends.”
One of these is the rise of artificial intelligence. ETS’s AI tools support the organization’s test-item generation and remote exam proctoring. AI also powers adaptive assessments, which change the type of questions students receive in response to their earlier answers. The company has also piloted tests that evaluate teachers’ ability to use AI in an educational context.
Now, ACT too can use those capabilities to build, deliver, and score assessments, Sevak said.
Separately, there’s also a “big opportunity to think about technical and vocational skills in the U.S.,” he said. “What are the kinds of products and services to support the [career and technical education] space in high school?”
In a statement, ACT CEO Steve Tapp said joining ETS would allow the organization to “take what we’ve built and scale it within a broader vision for readiness.”
What does the future hold for college admissions testing?
This new acquisition comes at a precarious time for college-admissions testing, on the heels of the test-optional movement and a federal push for career and technical education and workforce preparation.
Until 2024, ETS administered the College Board’s SAT test. “In some ways, they were two competitors,” said Scott Marion, a principal learning associate at the National Center for the Improvement of Educational Assessment, of the relationship between ETS and ACT.
“Both organizations have been struggling a little bit in recent years, especially with the pullback of various kinds of testing,” Marion said.
In 2024, ETS offered buyouts to most of its U.S. workforce.
“We’ve lost some companies in [the assessment] space, and now with these two relative giants in our field, we’re getting more consolidation,” said Marion. “If that allows them to survive rather than perish, that’s a good thing. But we have to look at that.”
The number of students taking the ACT—and the College Board’s SAT—fell during the pandemic. Participation has ticked up in the years since, but it hasn’t returned to pre-COVID peaks.
During the height of the pandemic, most colleges and universities dropped ACT and SAT requirements for the 2021-22 testing cycle. Hundreds extended that policy, and some haven’t reinstated test requirements.
At the same time, President Donald Trump’s administration has advocated for more workforce-development programs that “equip students with real-world skills.”
Some states have requested federal waivers to allow students to take workforce readiness assessments—including ACT’s WorkKeys—to meet federal accountability requirements, instead of traditional measures of academic ability.
Still, Sevak thinks the pendulum will swing back on college-admissions testing.
“The other measures that college-admissions directors use are really being questioned at a much, much greater scale than ever before,” he said, referencing recent media coverage of grade inflation at both public and elite universities.
Experts say that grades and standardized test scores both offer important signals about student readiness for postsecondary education.
