For at least the last day or so, there’s been a “BREAKING NEWS” post circulating around social media with the technically true but misleading (unintentionally, I hope?) claim that the SAT will have a “Science Score” in 2027. I’m seeing it shared by some fairly prominent admissions-related content creators, as well as by a fair number of college admissions consultants and parents. A few consultants have offered clarifications, and at least one content creator has debunked it.
For the rest of you, I just want to stop this one in its tracks.
First off, there’s no breaking news. College Board announced more than four months ago that, effective next spring, it will return to reporting a science score on the SAT. The test itself isn’t changing. No new section, no additional testing time. This is a change in how the results are reported, not in what students have to take.
In the 2016-23 iteration of the SAT, College Board provided a cross-test score called Analysis in Science. It compiled data from science-related questions across the test to offer an assessment of a student's ability to apply core skills in scientific contexts.
That score disappeared with the transition to the Digital SAT. Now College Board is introducing a new science-related cross-test score, drawing upon science-related questions in both the Math and Reading & Writing sections of the test, though we shouldn't assume the new score will be identical to the old one.
Was that old data ever used by admissions officers? The score was included in reporting to colleges, but I don’t know of good evidence that it became a mainstream consideration in admissions decisions.
Do we have any reason to think the new score will be? Not really. In fact, the College Board says the new score will be provided to schools and districts, but not to colleges and universities.
Does it change how a student should prepare for the SAT? Certainly not substantially. Probably not at all. But I'll admit the jury's still out on whether schools will find the data useful.
So what's behind the change?
It seems a bit more likely that this is part of the College Board's effort to appeal to schools and districts, including those considering large contracts. Its own marketing emphasizes the SAT as part of a broader “readiness system,” with earlier assessments, career-planning tools, and lower per-test costs for districts that adopt more of the SAT Suite. It’s making the case that schools should offer the SAT during school days, with access and educational benefits to students.
The science score is another selling point: more information without another 40 minutes of testing.
But College Board didn't exactly do us favors when, in its own YouTube video, it emphasized that the science score doesn't require an additional 40 minutes. Why’d they mention 40 minutes in particular? To me, that seems to invite a comparison to the ACT, which has a now-optional 40-minute Science section. Was the comparison intentional? I’ll let you decide.
Alas, no new Science section. No change in scores reported to colleges and universities. And no breaking news on the SAT front. But it’s easy to see why something like this could travel so quickly. This is a high-anxiety area of major importance to a lot of people — smart but busy people. We see something that looks authoritative and sounds plausible, we absorb it, and we move on. We don’t fact-check every claim we encounter, and we don’t necessarily see the correction when one appears.
And this isn’t just a problem with test announcements. Parents and students encounter an enormous amount of advice about college admissions on social media: what colleges supposedly want, which extracurricular activities are the “key” to the Ivies, and which test prep “tricks” can “guarantee” a 1500.
Some of that advice is useful. Some is incomplete, oversimplified, outdated, or simply wrong. And the fact that someone says something confidently—or that a claim gets repeated widely—doesn’t make it reliable.
The solution isn’t necessarily to be skeptical of everything you read or encounter. It’s to recognize that claims deserve different levels of scrutiny, and that not all advice is equally well supported.
Okay, I’ll step down from my soapbox and move on to actual breaking news: the LSAT is changing.
The Law School Admission Council announced just yesterday that, effective August 2027, the LSAT will change how it handles its experimental questions. Instead of having a separate unscored experimental section, those questions will be embedded in the Reading Comprehension and Logical Reasoning sections.
The test will have three sections instead of four, but the individual sections will be longer. Reading Comprehension will run 52 minutes, and each Logical Reasoning section will run 45 minutes. The overall test experience will be about 10 minutes longer, largely because of the break.
So if you're preparing for the LSAT, you'll want to be ready for longer sections. The number of scored questions and the skills being tested aren't changing.
And if you're thinking, can we get past the SAT first?
Yeah, you can revisit that one in four or five years. Maybe more. Maybe never.
And maybe the LSAT will have undergone yet another change by then.
Tom