<p>10 characters</p>
<p>There's a chart showing the differences here:</p>
<p>I took the March SAT and the April ACT...</p>
<p>I was very pressed for time on the Reading for the ACT, but I had enough time to review my answers twice on the SAT. Others said the ACT Reading was really easy, and they got done 5 minutes early. Also, the SAT is vocabulary-oriented, you need to know a lot of words. On the ACT, the vocabulary was simple.</p>
<p>The ACT math was extremely easy. It goes to pre-calc (which may pose problems for some testers) but many times, you need no outside info to answer questions. The questions are also much more direct... they don't ask for some weird answer like "twice the square root of x," like they do on the SAT.</p>
<p>The English was absurdly easy on the ACT. The only questions I didn't like were where they asked what was the WORST way to complete a sentence... why would you ever need to know that? It was still pretty similar to the SAT, though.</p>
<p>Science isn't on the SAT, obviously, but it was very easy for me, though others say it was very hard.</p>
<p>The essay, I thought, was stupid on the ACT. The ACT tends to ask about "real world" problems, whereas the SAT asks some sort of philosophical question. Also, you get 5 more minutes on the ACT, which is very nice.</p>
<p>Just for reference, I got a 2330 SAT (800CR, 760M, 770W/9E). Math is, in general, my strong point, and I'm a very slow reader.</p>
<p>The ACT is supposedly a test of what you know ... the SAT is supposedly a test of your potential. Not sure what that really means! However, I do know that my daughter did much better on the ACT than the SAT. Her SATs were good, but her ACTs were really good. I suggest you take both & see what happens.</p>