A practice question that no longer matches the real test does not announce itself. It has a stem, four or five plausible options, and one right answer. It can be perfectly correct and still be practice for a test that no longer exists. That is the whole problem: a broken question gets reported, and a stale one gets answered.

Both tests changed recently. The SAT went digital and adaptive internationally in 2023 and in the United States in 2024. The ACT was rebuilt across 2025 and 2026. Questions written for the older versions did not disappear the day the format shifted, and plenty of them are still in circulation in workbooks, in shared decks, and in question banks nobody has looked at since.

Here are three checks you can run on material you already have.

An option E or K in ACT Math dates the question

The ACT used to give Math five answer choices, lettered A through E on odd-numbered questions and F through K on even ones. It gives four now.

We counted the options in the Math sections of the current official practice tests. Every odd question runs A, B, C, D. Every even question runs F, G, H, J. Across all four official forms there is not a single option E and not a single option K, in Math or anywhere else.

So the check takes seconds. Open your ACT Math material and look for an option E. If you find one, that question belongs to the legacy five-choice format.

What it does not tell you is how old the question is. The four-choice Math section arrived in stages, not on one date: online national testing first, then paper national testing, then state and district testing. Five-choice questions were still being administered somewhere through that whole period, so a recent copyright line is no evidence that a question matches the current test. The answer choices are the evidence.

A five-choice question may still be decent algebra practice. It is not practice for the test you are going to sit, and the odds of guessing right are different too.

One SAT passage with several questions hanging off it

The old SAT gave you a long passage and asked eight or ten questions about it. The digital SAT does not. College Board describes its Reading and Writing passages as ranging "from 25 to 150 words," each one "followed by a single multiple-choice question."

That is a much bigger change than it sounds. On the old format you could read slowly, because the reading cost was spread across ten questions. On the current one, every question brings its own text, so reading speed and re-reading habits matter in a completely different way.

If your practice material pairs one passage with a block of questions, it is teaching a pacing strategy the current test will punish.

A no-calculator section on an SAT practice test

The SAT Math section is now two modules of 35 minutes. Not a calculator section and a no-calculator section. Two modules, and the second one gets harder or easier depending on how the first went. The same is true of Reading and Writing: two modules of 32 minutes.

A practice test built around a no-calculator section is testing a constraint that was removed. If you are drilling mental arithmetic because a practice book told you a whole section forbids the calculator, you are budgeting time for a rule that no longer applies.

Format changes are the loud version of a slower problem

All three checks above catch the same thing: a question that outlived a published change. Those are the easy cases, because there is a date to point at.

The harder cases have no announcement. Question styles drift between administrations without any format change at all. A topic gets tested more often, or a question type quietly stops appearing. Source material ages: a passage about a recent finding reads as current for a while and then reads as dated, and the question attached to it starts to feel like a history question. None of that shows up in a changelog, because there is no changelog.

There is a third kind, and it is the one people miss. A question can be correct, current, and still not worth asking, because nearly everyone gets it right. It takes up a slot and tells you nothing about what you do not know. Correctness is the floor, not the bar.

What this means for a question bank

A bank built once and left alone gets worse every year, whether or not anybody touches it. Nothing has to break. The test simply moves.

So our questions get re-examined rather than shipped and forgotten. When a format changes, we go back through the material that assumed the old one and take out what no longer matches, instead of leaving it in because it is technically still answerable. Questions that stop discriminating between students who know the material and students who do not come out as well. Every question that goes in is checked by more than one independent reviewer before it is served, and being checked once does not exempt it from being checked again.

That is less exciting than adding thousands of new questions, and it is the part that decides whether the practice reflects the test.

If you are working from older material

You do not have to throw it out. Old questions are often fine content practice, and the underlying algebra and grammar did not change when the format did.

What you should not do is use them to build habits about timing, guessing, or pacing. Those are exactly the things the format changes moved. Take your timing from current official material, from College Board's practice tests or ACT's four official forms, and treat older books as a source of problems rather than a rehearsal.

If you want the specifics of what moved, we wrote them up separately: what changed on the digital SAT and the enhanced ACT in 2026.

The sources behind these three checks

The ACT counts come from the Math sections of the official practice test PDFs published on act.org, with the answer-choice letters counted directly out of the text rather than taken from a summary. The SAT passage description and the module structure are quoted from College Board's own pages describing the test, and the launch dates from its own announcement of the digital SAT.

We compared the Math sections of the four current official ACT forms, so nothing here is a claim about English, Reading or Science in either direction.