On April 8, 2025, a server malfunction disrupted the ACT for roughly 11,000 Illinois students on a state graduation-requirement test day. In mid-May 2026, Illinois education officials notified school districts that ACT was rescoring tests nationwide for students who had tested online during spring school-day administrations. ACT’s own director of strategic communications, Juan Elizondo, later confirmed to a Wisconsin television station that the company’s process for making scores comparable across different test forms had failed for this group. It was the second major ACT testing-system failure to affect school-day administrations in 13 months. ACT was still completing the reporting and quality-control process from that incident in late May and early June when ETS announced on June 30 that it was acquiring ACT; the deal closed July 1. Here’s what’s confirmed, what’s still genuinely unsettled, and what that means for the testing plan you build with a client this fall.
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In today’s issue (free analysis):
What actually happened in ACT’s two nationwide technical failures over the past 13 months, confirmed through state education officials and ACT’s own on-the-record spokesperson, not test-prep chatter
How ACT changed ownership twice in two years, first to a private equity firm in 2024, then to ETS on July 1, and what each organization has and hasn’t confirmed about what changes next
Where testing requirements actually stand this cycle: a picture that’s both more mandatory and less universal than most coverage suggests
A short update on a separate, fast-moving story: a federal judge just let an antitrust case over Early Decision proceed to discovery
For paid subscribers:
The paper-versus-digital decision framework to use with clients this fall, built specifically from where the two documented failures actually occurred
A three-bucket target-list audit your clients can run in one sitting to sort every school on their list by actual testing requirement status
The specific verification habit worth adding to every testing timeline this cycle, and why “the school received the score” stopped being a safe assumption to skip
The first incident is documented directly by state officials and an independent education newsroom. On April 8, 2025, a malfunction on ACT’s servers delayed the start of the exam for thousands of students across Illinois and prevented others from moving between sections once they’d begun, according to Chalkbeat Chicago’s reporting at the time. About 11,000 students were affected. Illinois requires the ACT to satisfy a high school graduation requirement, so this wasn’t an optional test day for the students involved. State Superintendent Tony Sanders raised the issue directly with ACT’s president, according to Chalkbeat. Some schools resumed testing that day; others rescheduled. A spokesperson for ACT confirmed to Chalkbeat that a server malfunction caused the delay.
The second incident was broader by design, not by coincidence. On May 12, 2026, Illinois education officials again notified districts, this time that ACT was reissuing scores nationwide for every student who’d taken the test online during spring school-day administrations, not a regional problem. Districts in other states, including Ohio, got the same notice the following day. Juan Elizondo, ACT’s director of strategic communications, told Wisconsin’s WMTV that the root cause was in the process that makes scores comparable across different test forms and different testing conditions. “We caught that it didn’t work,” Elizondo said, and added that ACT had corrected the process and was rescoring the affected tests. Paper test-takers and Saturday national test-takers were not affected, only the online school-day group. ACT said no corrected score would come in lower than the original. ACT initially targeted June 2 for completion of the revised reporting process, although affected students began seeing scores restored in MyACT by May 22.
Both incidents landed inside a larger transition already underway. ACT shortened its exam and made the science section optional starting in fall 2025, part of a broader push toward digital administration, the same stretch in which both failures occurred. In 2024, ACT entered into a transaction with private-equity firm Nexus Capital Management that moved its operating business into a new for-profit public benefit corporation, while a separate Iowa nonprofit retained an investment in the company. Then, on June 30, 2026, ETS announced it was acquiring ACT from Nexus. Encoura is not part of that deal; it stays with Nexus. ETS is the nonprofit that administers the GRE and TOEFL and, until 2024, administered the College Board’s SAT under contract. ETS CEO Amit Sevak told Higher Ed Dive that ETS approached Nexus about the deal, not the reverse, and that ETS plans to keep ACT’s for-profit legal structure in place “for now,” language that leaves the door open to a different structure later. ACT CEO Steve Tapp, who took the role in October 2025, said joining ETS would let ACT “take what we’ve built and scale it within a broader vision for readiness.”
It’s worth being precise about what both organizations have actually confirmed versus what remains open. ETS’s own announcement and subsequent reporting from U.S. News state plainly that there are no changes to the ACT’s format, scoring, testing schedule, or score reporting as a result of the acquisition, and that ACT will run as a standalone organization for now. But Sevak also told Higher Ed Dive that leadership still needs to work out what comes after this year in more detail. Read together, the honest picture is: the announced position is that there will be no near-term changes to ACT's products or services during this admissions cycle; longer-term structural questions remain open.
There’s a piece of context that complicates that reassurance further. In January 2026, the Wall Street Journal reported that ETS was exploring a sale of its own two flagship exams, the GRE and TOEFL, in a deal valued at roughly $500 million, a report that Inside Higher Ed and Forbes both independently confirmed. Public reporting has not established whether that process remains active. Selling off two signature products while acquiring a major competitor’s exam isn’t automatically contradictory, but it undercuts any assumption that a nonprofit acquirer means more stability for ACT than a private equity owner would have.
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Timing matters because of what’s happening on the admissions side. We’ve tracked the Ivy testing reversals across several issues this year. What’s new since the last one: Columbia announced in June that it will follow Princeton back to required testing, both effective for the 2027-28 cycle. That leaves six of the eight Ivies, Harvard, Yale (which ended its test-flexible policy in May 2026, closing the AP/IB alternative and moving to a straight SAT/ACT requirement), Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, and Penn, requiring a score from applicants this cycle, a tier most IEC clients target directly, which means "should we submit a score" isn't really an open question anymore for those schools.
This is a different story from the testing consolidation above, and a different case from the 568 Presidents Group financial-aid settlement covered in a previous issue. On August 7, 2026, U.S. District Judge Angel Kelley in Massachusetts ruled that an antitrust lawsuit against 32 selective colleges over their use of Early Decision can proceed to discovery, according to Higher Ed Dive’s August 11 report and a same-day press release from Cohen Milstein, counsel for the plaintiffs. The case, D’Amico v. Consortium on Financing Higher Education, was brought not by a government agency but by four current and former students from Wesleyan, Vassar, and Washington University in St. Louis. The plaintiffs allege that the schools have an informal agreement not to recruit or admit students who break an Early Decision commitment, and argue that this coordination, not an independently enforceable contract between a student and a college is what gives ED its practical binding character. Judge Kelley found that claim plausible enough to survive the schools’ motion to dismiss, and in a separate ruling issued the same day, rejected a jurisdictional challenge from schools based outside Massachusetts, including Duke and Vanderbilt, keeping the full defendant list in the case. She did dismiss Common App, Scoir, and the Consortium on Financing Higher Education from the case, a result Common App’s own counsel, Steptoe, confirmed in an August 10 release, finding the plaintiffs hadn’t adequately alleged those organizations joined or facilitated the alleged conspiracy. The case now moves to discovery. Nothing about how ED works has changed yet, but the legal question of whether its binding character rests on anything more than an informal agreement among competitors is now formally in play, and it’s worth watching before you next describe ED as simply binding in a family meeting.
Knowing that ACT’s ownership just changed hands in the middle of its least stable technical stretch, at the exact moment testing became mandatory again at a narrow but high-stakes tier of schools, is one thing. Knowing what to actually tell a family building a testing plan this fall is what the paid section below covers.
Higher Ed Insights is reader-supported. If you are reading this as a free subscriber and you work in college counseling, financial aid, enrollment management, or high school education, the paid section is written directly for you.
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