Did you know: not all questions on the ACT actually count towards your final score? That’s right: sprinkled in among the real questions are experimental questions (aka “field test questions,”) which the ACT-makers use at every test sitting to try out future questions on current test-takers. While most students won’t do anything in particular with that fact (if they even know about it to begin with!), YOU are going to use this knowledge to increase your score.
And today’s post is going to show you how. (It’ll also explain in more detail WHAT experimental questions are, in case you’re not familiar!)
By the way: the ACT’s experimental questions have changed recently (this year, 2025). I’m going to break down how your strategy should change accordingly.
I’m a fan of small tweaks to your prep that reap you big rewards come test day. That’s how I’ve helped hundreds of students get the ACT and SAT scores of their dreams. I believe in working smart, not just hard.
Let’s get into it!
Article Contents
2. What are experimental questions on the ACT?
A. How experimental questions used to work
B. Experimental questions are different in 2025!
3. Which questions are experimental on the ACT? And how should that change your test-taking strategy?
A. English
B. Math
C. Reading
D. Science
4. Conclusion
Watch this post as a video:
Definition of Experimental Questions on the ACT
So, what IS an experimental question, exactly? It’s a question that test-takers fill out but that does NOT count towards their actual score. So if you get the Q right, that's great…but it doesn’t actually get calculated into your final score out of 36. If you get it wrong, it’s equally great…because it doesn’t get calculated into your final score.
You might be wondering why the ACT is making you solve these extra problems to begin with. Isn’t it just a waste of everybody’s time—for the question-writers and the test-takers alike?
Nope. See, the ACT needs to try out material for future exams, and they need to do it in a way where they can reliably figure out how hard a given question is, on a scale of “cakewalk” to “final boss.” And they’re going to do that by counting how many students got that question right or wrong in the trial run.
How experimental questions used to work
In years past, the ACT would sometimes administer a fifth multiple-choice section in addition to the standard four. This experimental section came last in the lineup, and would be much shorter than the sections that counted towards your score.
In this faux section, the test-makers would include some English Qs, or some math problems, or whatever content they wanted to try out on their guinea pigs. The problem with administering these Qs in a dedicated section, though, was that students knew these questions didn’t count towards their actual score. So most test-takers either didn't fill in that section at all, or they just totally phoned it in. If they filled in the questions but didn’t put much effort in, the ACT creators couldn’t actually determine if that passage was truly hard, easy, or somewhere in between.
Experimental Qs have changed in 2025!
This spurred the ACT-makers to change tack. Beginning in 2025, the ACT’s experimental questions are incorporated silently into each real section of the test. You are not told which questions matter to your score and which don’t.
So you’ll presumably be taking all of the questions equally seriously, which, the ACT hopes, will give them more accurate data about whether a new question is easy, medium, or hard.
This, in turn, will allow the ACT powers-that-be to more accurately create future tests that are approximately the same level of difficulty as the one you’re taking that day, and that are scored with an appropriate scoring rubric. It's actually a win for everyone.
Although there's no foolproof way to know for certain that a given passage or question does or doesn't count, there are some clues that we can gather—which will, in turn, help you determine which Qs you should spend extra time and thought on. That’s what we’re going to dive into now.
How to identify & approach experimental questions on the ACT
Now for the good stuff: what do these experimental questions look like? Are there any consistent indicators as to which Qs they might be….or at least which ones they're not? And what should you, the test-taker, actually DO differently in answering such Qs?
We’ll be approaching this treasure hunt section by section (including the optional Science section, because I know many of you have to take it!).
ACT English: which are field test questions?
English section format
In the refurbished version of the ACT, the English section has 50 questions, and you've got 35 minutes to complete it (if you're a regular-time test-taker).
These 50 questions are distributed among six different passages, but there are two different lengths of passage:
Four passages are going to be on the longer side. They're each going to have ten questions attached.
Two passages will be shorter and will only be accompanied by five questions each.
Here’s why that matters.
Out of the 50 questions that you’re going to complete in the ACT's English section, a full 10 of them are experimental. In other words, your score is only going to be calculated based on 40 of the 50 answers you submitted.
The other thing: at least when it goes for the four real practice tests that are out there (the ones published in the 2025-26 ACT Official Guide Book), ALL of those experimental questions are attached to a single passage. In other words, you won’t find a random experimental question in passage one, and a few more in passage two, and another one in passage three. The draft questions are all clustered within the same passage.
How that affects your approach
Now, this is what that means for YOUR strategy.
If the four existing practice tests are any indication, we have only two options for how the ten non-counting questions can be distributed amidst the passages:
One of the longer ten-question passages is entirely made up of experimental Qs.
Both of the short five-question passages are experimental.
I have not seen ANY practice test do the latter, i.e., totally dedicate BOTH shorty passages to Qs that don’t count towards your score.
So, if you're running out of time on the English section, make sure that you DO prioritize completing the questions that ask about the two short passages. Because it seems likely that all ten of those questions will actually impact your score!
That might mean you need to approach your passages out of order to make sure you dedicate enough time to the two short ones. The final English passage you complete should be one of the longer passages (with ten related questions). Worse comes to worst, that's the one you should be guessing on if you’ve only got a minute left and don’t have time to actually read or process the passage.
Finding experimental problems on the ACT Math
Proceeding, in order, to the second part of the ACT, we encounter the Math section. In its new format, the ACT asks you 45 questions and you’ve got 50 minutes to complete them (with regular time).
Out of those 45 questions, only 41 of them really count towards your score. That means you’re looking at four experimental questions.
Of course, we don't have passages in Math. So these four experimental questions are going to be scattered throughout the section, not grouped together.
If you are the type of person who maybe runs a little tight on time during this part of the test, you are NOT going to change your strategy in response to the four experimental questions. You're still going to start at the beginning of the Math section and work the questions in order because the problems tend to start at the easiest end of the spectrum and then work their way up to the harder ones.
By answering questions roughly in the order that you encounter them in, and then cherry-picking or guessing on a few at the end that you don't have time for, you’re not placing yourself at particular risk at having to guess on four that count versus four that don’t.
tl;dr: proceed as usual through the Math section.
How can you tell which Reading ACT questions don't count?
The Reading section is especially tricky for experimental Qs
Now let’s talk Reading. As you know, this segment of the ACT contains 36 questions. And if you're a regular time test-taker, you have 40 minutes to accomplish this in. Those 36 questions are split across into four passages of equal length. And they're always in the same order:
Fiction (one)
Nonfiction (three), divvied up like so:
Social science
Humanities
Natural science
One of these passages—we can’t predict which—will be a double passage, where you'll be given passage A and passage B. You’ll be asked some questions about the first, some about the second, and a few questions about how the two passages relate to each other.
Now, here's how the experimental questions work in this section.
A full nine questions in the Reading section are experimental and do not count towards your ACT Reading score. And just as we discussed above in the context of the English section, the test-makers do NOT scatter these non-counting questions throughout. Instead, it's a whole passage that is experimental.
But here's the thing. Unlike in the English section, there’s no way of knowing which passage is the imposter in the Reading part of the test.
There have been test sittings where the experimental passage has been the very first one you encounter. There have been tests where it's the second or the third or the fourth. There have been tests where it's a double passage, and there are tests where it's one of the three single passages.
So this is why it gets a little complicated in this section if you’re one of the people who tends to not quite finish all four of your reading passages in the allotted time.
In the past, I would have advised you to spend enough time getting the three easiest passages as close to perfect as you can. And then you’d just guess c, or d, or whatever your letter of the day was for that fourth passage. Now, you're probably not going to get a perfect score approaching it that way. But some people could actually use this strategy to boost their score from “meh” to “pretty solid” (maybe a 28, 29, sometimes even a 30).
This is because they were spending MORE time on the three passages they were MORE confident about and thus more likely to correctly answer questions about, so long as they put the thinking in. And they weren’t sinking too much time into questions that they weren’t going to do as well on no matter what.
But you can't do that anymore. Because we just don’t know which passage is going to be experimental and which three count. What if you spend ALL of your time carefully answering the first three passages’ Qs, and then just guessed on the last one…but the experimental passage happened to be one of those first three, and it didn’t end up counting? You got a bunch of fake questions right, sure—but that doesn’t help your score. AND, yikes, one of the passages that you randomly guessed on…does affect your score, and probably not in a good way, since you were answering randomly. No bueno.
What to do about it
So here’s what you’re going to do instead.
If you tend to struggle a bit with finishing all four of the reading passages in the allotted forty minutes, you need to make sure you get to every passage, even if you don't spend as long per passage as you would like.
In other words: you must allow yourself no more than ten minutes per passage. If that means you have to guess on a question or two towards of a given passage, so be it. At least you were able to really try for the other eight or nine questions per passage.
This will help us mitigate the risk that you end up guessing on a whole passage that does count…and instead squander precious time focusing on a passage that doesn’t count.
Science ACT experimental question guide
Science section breakdown
Finally, we’ve reached the fourth multiple choice section on the ACT: the Science section!
Yes, I know it's optional now. However, most students I'm working with one-on-one in 2025 are still opting into this section because there are, or may be, a couple schools on their college list that require it. Even if you're a sophomore or a junior, maybe you don't know exactly which schools you want to apply to yet—but you also don't want to only complete the first three sections of the ACT and later risk not being able to apply to a given school because they require the Science section.
The Science section of the ACT has 40 questions and you have 40 minutes to finish it. These 40 questions are distributed across seven science passages, but unevenly. This matters a lot to our strategy, so I’ll explain it in a bit more detail:
Two of these passages are going to be regular old "Charts and Graphs" passages, and they each have five questions.
One passage is what I call a "Fighting Scientists" passage or a “Conflicting Scientific Viewpoints” passage. It has six questions.
The remaining four passages are all what we call "Experiment" passages (not to be confused with “experimental”!). They include words like "study 1," "study 2," "experiment 1,” "experiment 2,” "trial 1,” "trial 2," etc. Each of these Experiment passages also has six questions.
The order of the passages is different with each test sitting.
But this is what we DO know: there are going to be six experimental questions. And much like the other ACT sections that include passages—English and Reading—the Qs are not scattered throughout the Science section, across various passages. All of the experimental questions are concentrated in the same passage.
In other words, the section will give you seven passages, of which six count towards your score, and one does not.
Which questions are experimental in the Science section?
Luckily, we’ve been given a clue as to how to proceed. The type of passage that doesn't count has exactly six questions in it. Right? So 34 questions out of the 40 contribute to your score, while six do not.
So, pop quiz: from the breakdown above, do you remember which passage types were the ones that had six questions? Not the Charts and Graphs; those had five, so that's not going to be an experimental passage. But the Fighting Scientists passage has six, as do those four different “Experiment” passages. So we know the non-counting questions have to be attached either to the Fighting Scientists or to one of the Experiment passages.
But let’s think about it for a second further. We only get ONE Fighting Scientist passage in the entire Science section. Would they really make that one the passage that doesn't count? Then they’d never get to score you on the skills that “Fighting Scientists” passages assess.
Indeed, in the four practice tests that the ACT has offered to the world, it's never been the Fighting Scientists passage that was experimental. That one's always counted because it's the only one of its type. It would be unfair for an ACT test-taker in October to NOT have the Fighting Scientists passage count for them, only to have that same type of passage actually matter for the person who takes it in December. Because each of the passage types plays to different strengths and weaknesses.
So what does that leave us with? You guessed it. The experimental passage pretty much HAS to be one of the “Experiment” passages.
How to approach the science section
Here’s how you're going to alter your strategy based on this new revelation, especially if you are one of those students who tends to be tight on time in the Science section.
Regardless of what order they give you the science passages in, you're going to make sure that you attack those Charts and Graphs passages and the Fighting Scientists passage first—or at least in the first half (first twenty minutes) of your forty minutes total. You do NOT want to wait ‘til the end to begin those three passages. Because we know that there’s a very, very high likelihood that those three passages ARE going to count towards your score.
Once you've given adequate time to the Fighting Scientists and the Charts and Graphs passages, even if you’re going to run out of time or have to guess on a couple questions, you’ll be doing so with one of the Experiment passage questions. And there's a solid chance that the passage you have to shortchange might be experimental and thus not count against you, if in fact you get its attached questions wrong.
Conclusion
Phew! You made it! I hope you now feel more confident knowing that there are some actionable steps you can take in order to prioritize the questions that are likelier to actually impact your score on the ACT.
If you want even more tips and tricks about the ACT, the SAT, or college application essays, you can learn more about working one-on-one with me personally, or check out my self-guided courses and ebooks.
