Is the ACT® Science Section Required?
Read time: 7 min · Last updated: June 8, 2026
Short answer: probably not for your son or daughter. But "probably not" isn't a plan, so here's the actual one.
Take the science once. See how it goes. Then decide whether to take it again.
That's the whole strategy. Everything below is why.
What actually changed
In 2025, the ACT® got shorter and the science section became optional. The new composite score is just English, math, and reading. If your child takes science, that score gets reported separately — it doesn't touch the composite. The full breakdown of the redesign lives in the complete guide to the enhanced ACT.
Optional online started April 2025. Optional on paper started September 2025. Adding science costs $5 on top of the $70 base fee.
My take on why this happened: a private equity firm took over the ACT® while enrollment was declining, and they redesigned the test. Private equity usually messes things up. The ACT® is a solid test. So far, it's stayed solid.
A quick word on the SAT, since parents always ask: the SAT has science too — it just doesn't have a dedicated section for it. Science themes are baked into the reading passages and the chart-and-graph analysis questions scattered through the rest of the test. The ACT® is the one that gives science its own section, which is why ACT® science goes deeper into actual natural-science material (chemistry, physics, biology, geology) than anything you'll see on the SAT. So "skip science" is an ACT®-specific decision; on the SAT there's nothing to skip.
The science section was never really a science test
This matters more than the policy change, so hear it clearly. Despite the name, the ACT® Science section has always been a data-interpretation and reasoning test, not a content test. It's reading graphs, analyzing experimental setups, and drawing conclusions from conflicting data. There's almost no actual chemistry or biology or geology or physics or any science knowledge actually being tested.
Parents whose kids struggle in science class often skip the section assuming their kid will bomb it. They usually shouldn't. Students improve on this section fast. Science scores tend to land right around a student's other section scores. It's not as bad as it might sound.
Who actually requires it
If your child is applying for a STEM degree, even remotely, congratulations — they're taking the science section. Full stop.
For everyone else, the honest read on the data: science died fast. The most credible piece of original research here is Edison Prep's survey of more than 250 universities. They found the section has effectively died at 95% of schools — a quick death compared to the decade-long fadeaway of the ACT® essay. Their conclusion: aside from a small handful, 99% of colleges won't require science for the class of 2026 and beyond.
Edison also reports a telling reason for the quick death. According to them, finance departments at two East Coast schools that were considering requiring science vetoed the idea — the concern was that requiring it adds friction to applying and could scare off applicants in a shaky economy, including international families who matter a great deal to the bottom line. Take that as Edison's reporting rather than gospel, but it tracks: schools removed a barrier at a moment when they couldn't afford to lose applicants.
There's a competing survey from North Avenue Education (223 universities) putting the "required or strongly recommended" number closer to 30%. My take: that's mostly "strongly recommended," not "required," and the two are not the same thing. The discrepancy between surveys is itself the problem — different methods, different definitions of "recommended," contradictory guidance at exactly the moment families want a clean answer.
Here's where it actually stands to reason:
- Requires science: Boston University, Georgetown, Pomona, Marquette, and all the service academies (Naval, Air Force, etc.). George Washington's BA/MD program too. Marquette has a quirk worth knowing: skip science and you have to apply test-optional — they won't consider your ACT® at all.
- Strongly recommends: Duke, Michigan, Michigan State, RIT, Johns Hopkins, and per some trackers Carnegie Mellon. MIT says science isn't required but tells every family to take it anyway.
- Doesn't use it: most of the Ivies, Stanford, Georgia Tech, Caltech, USC, Penn State, UConn, Virginia Tech, UGA, Colorado Boulder, BYU, Miami, and the whole State University System of Florida.
- Test-blind (no scores at all): the University of California system — though that's very likely to change.
The real takeaway is that there's exactly one reliable source of truth: the university itself. Everyone in this space agrees on that. One school on your list requiring it means, functionally, you're taking it.
The trap parents fall into
This is the one I want to correct directly, because the common advice on it is half-baked.
A lot of families assume their kid can take science, score poorly, and then just leave it off the application — report only the three-section composite. They can't. When you send a test date, ACT® sends every section score from that date. There's no hiding one section inside a report.
But here's the part most articles skip, and it's the part that actually matters: science doesn't factor into the composite. So a weak science score shouldn't matter… unless it does. And that "unless it does" is the entire reason this article exists.
Two wrinkles, and they're real:
The internal-composite wrinkle. Science is out of the ACT®'s headline composite. But that doesn't mean a college isn't quietly computing its own internal number that includes it. If your child sends a science score, an admissions office could fold it into their own calculation. There's no way to know — the admissions officers may not even know themselves, and they certainly won't tell you. Or me for that matter.
The score-choice wrinkle. A student can choose not to send certain test dates. So which dates you send is part of the math too. If there's a date where science went badly, score choice (at schools that allow it) lets you send a different date entirely. You still can't surgically remove science from a given date — but you can choose which date goes.
The superscore picture is its own version of this. The ACT®'s own superscore report drops science. But colleges set their own superscoring rules, and roughly 75% of schools tracked by Compass superscore the ACT®. A school that superscores and cares about science could pull your best science score across dates back in. Don't assume. Because this stuff is complicated.
The STEM score and scholarships
A couple more places science shows up that you may not be aware of:
The science score feeds the STEM score, which combines math and science. Specific programs — engineering, pre-health, nursing — and some competitive scholarships use the STEM score. So even at a school that doesn't require science for general admission, a program inside that school might.
And scholarships are their own beast. West Virginia's PROMISE scholarship, for example, still requires a science subscore of 19 even after ACT® made the section optional. Bright Futures, TOPS, and other state programs are worth checking if your family is counting on merit aid. It's the same logic behind how colleges actually use ACT® scores — the testing company doesn't get the final word; the institution does.
"Optional" has never meant "ignored"
We've seen this show before. The ACT® writing section was "optional" too, and it hung on at a handful of schools for years before nearly vanishing. (If writing is on your radar, here's whether your child should take the ACT® with writing.) Optional science is on the same story arc — phased out at most schools, held onto at a few, and rewarding the families who spend five minutes finding out which bucket their list falls into.
It's also worth stating plainly: the "optional means secretly required" panic from the test-optional era did not repeat here. By every independent survey, science genuinely died at almost every school. Skipping is a defensible default for many kids.
So here's the plan
Take it once.
If it's strong, you have the data point and you're done worrying about it.
If it's weak, the composite is unaffected anyway, and you can drop science from every sitting after that. The whole hedge costs $5 and about 40 minutes — a small price for keeping your options open while your child's college list is still moving.
Once you know where your son or daughter is applying, you'll know whether science actually matters for those specific schools. And because you took it once, you'll already have the score and the proof that it's a non-issue.
One real exception: accommodations. If your child tests with extended time, science becomes a serious drag on an already-long day. The "take it once" rule still applies — unless the student is genuinely certain they'll never go anywhere near STEM. Extended time plus a hard no on STEM is the one case where I'd say skip science entirely from the start. But such cases are extremely rare — many students only find out they need formal accommodations after taking the ACT® once.