From Quora: "Do the Math and English+Reading parts in ACT differ so much from SAT's? I prepared for SAT exam before and couldn't take it because of the pandemic, now I'm taking ACT instead (it is the only option in my country, Belarus)."

No - the reading and English sections of the SAT and ACT are almost identical these days. The ACT English test is the same as the SAT Writing test. The main difference in the reading section is the ACT gives you less time to do it, so you have to really pick and choose which passages to do first, and you almost always should skip to the questions, then scan the passages for the answers, whereas you don’t necessarily have to do that on the SAT. SAT reading passages have more high-level, analytical questions, but not as many as they used to have, since the SAT has really worked to be more like the ACT (the ACT’s been taking away the SAT’s market share in recent years).


The difference in the math sections is that the ACT has only one 60-minute math section, and it mostly gives you easier questions to do more quickly than on the SAT. The ACT has 60 questions to do in 60 minutes, so one per minute; the SAT gives you slightly more time per question than that - like 1.25 minutes per question. The SAT has two math sections (one allows calculator use; the other doesn’t) that have more “trick” questions (you have to read them carefully to avoid making stupid mistakes and/or there’s a quick shortcut you can use to avoid really tedious calculations). The ACT has some things I haven’t seen on the SAT (e.g., questions about matrices), but they’re a tiny portion of the ACT math test (maybe one or two questions).