Winners Take the ACT on Paper!
Last updated 12/04/25 (to address the addition of Desmos calculator on the digital ACT)
By: Brian Eufinger, Edison Prep
The ACT has long administered the international ACT on computers, and more recently, domestically via “school day testing”: many school districts do state-wide testing. Only recently has the ACT made the digital version of the ACT an option on national (Saturday/Sunday) test dates.
Clients ask Edison Prep “should I choose to take the ACT on computer or paper?” on a daily basis. Given the choice, students should always take the test on paper. Full stop. There are zero defensible reasons to choose a digital ACT when a paper test is available if you want to maximize college admissions, merit aid scholarships, or both.
The rest of this blog post illustrates in copious detail why your student should only take the paper ACT; the ACT has publicly committed to the paper option for the foreseeable future, especially since a number of important statewide contracts prefer it.
If the Digital ACT were a Netflix show:
Why take the paper ACT instead of digital ACT?
- Computer glitches during upload. We taught a bootcamp in Atlanta in October 2024 for a high school whose student body was going to be testing on a computer, only to have a glitch prevent the data from uploading at the end; all 300 students were unable to receive scores. Many of the students were seniors who had to then scramble to take the December test (the December ACT is 4th down for seniors!). The admissions impact was real, and the merit aid impact probably runs into the seven figures.
- Computer lag when switching between back and forth between questions adds up, especially when there’s 215 questions.
- Harder to complete practice tests in the format you’ll be testing on. There are currently just two digital tests available.
- Students can have wi-fi issues at the testing site, especially if they’re using a school-issued Chromebook that has very strict security settings, as most do. And Chromebook screens are often painfully small. And Gen Z students are averse to using a wireless mouse for better precision and speed.
- Not being able to write directly on the math and science problem, draw lines of best fit, etc. slows students down and reduces accuracy. This is the most obvious point, and Science and Math are hard enough to finish in time without this additional unnecessary handicap!
- Professional tutors recommend paper. An industry survey of professional tutors asking which format they recommended saw a vote of: Paper, 77; Digital, 3. Tutors are a feisty, non-monolithic bunch and never agree this closely on anything. Edison Prep wouldn’t refer to a tutor who recommended digital ACT; it’d be malpractice to refer to someone so profoundly misinformed about basic facets of the test.
- Locally, Edison Prep has a great case study with its own clients. We have great data from our 500+ Fulton County students who took the paper February ACT, then digital Fulton county ACT in March (Fulton chooses to do digital), and then paper again in April. Math and Science are especially impacted; it’s not ideal.
- Case Study #2: Three of our 350+ Sept. 2025 students “went rogue” and took the Digital ACT against our advice, and their scores got absolutely butchered. They owned up to their mistake afterwards. While their English scores were mostly similar (same or -1 or -2 points), Math and Reading were 5-8 points lower than the tests they had recently completed on paper, which makes sense given the reasons given above.
- “But what about Desmos? The Digital ACT now has the Desmos online calculator. Does this change the decision where paper is always better?”
It has often been said that the worst dog on its worst day is better than the best cat on its best day. The same is true when comparing the incredibly powerful TI-84 calculator to the Desmos online calculator. There is nothing that Desmos online calculator can do on the ACT that cannot be better solved with a TI84, even more so since our students learn powerful TI-84 strategies and use powerful TI-84 tools that we give them. Even if Desmos were better than the 84, the damage it does to the English, Math, and Reading sections via reasons #1-8 far outweighs any perceived benefit of the Desmos calculator.And last but not least… - The digital ACT test can be graded more harshly than the paper test. Case study: The September 2024 test was a released test, with the exact same questions on the digital and paper version that were administered that day. But the digital test (Form D26) and the paper test (Form H11) had different scales, with the digital curve being 0-4 questions harsher than the paper at various points in each section’s curve. We can’t post the image of those scales here, but the kids on Reddit make it easy for a parent who’s curious to look at the last few pages of both formats and confirm.
NOTE #1: If you are a student who is forced to take the Digital ACT via “school-day testing” and due to your school district’s decision, have no choice but to take the digital format, it is what it is, and at worst, it’s an extra shot to superscore, so be appreciative! In order to familiarize yourself with what test day will look like, please go to www.edisonprep.com/cbt/ for some extra tips on the computer-based format!
NOTE #2: There are some large, mostly online tutoring firms that will claim the digital ACT is better, but claim that mostly reflects the fact that those companies’ online product and mock tests are done digitally and it’s vital to those big companies’ bottom lines that students not realize how devastatingly poor of a choice the digital ACT is when the paper option is available. As Upton Sinclair famously said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Note: #3: Because the Digital SAT was physically built from scratch around the Desmos calculator, Desmos is an amazing and critical tool for the SAT. However, the ACT is largely unchanged since the Reagan administration, so the tool that it was been built around for 50 years (the TI-80 to TI-84 calculator) unsurprisingly remains the superior tool for the job!
Need help on the SAT/ACT?
Edison Prep is a boutique SAT tutoring firm based out of Sandy Springs, GA but that works with students in 25+ states and almost 10 countries. It’s small team of professional, full-time tutors (no college kids!) has over 170,000 hours of tutoring experience, yet with prices lower than many big-box college kid hedge-fund owned tutor agencies. (Almost every firm you’ve heard of is owned by a hedge fund and staffed by college kids!). Check us out here: www.edisonprep.com/start/
Questions? Contact us at [email protected] or 404-333-8573.
