Is There a Khan Academy for the ACT?
Read time: 4 min · Last updated: June 21, 2026
Khan Academy has no official ACT prep. Its only standardized test partnership is with College Board, for the SAT. Parents want a structured, trustworthy way to raise their son or daughter's test score. The free content can teach the material, but it's not very helpful to explain to your child why they're missing the questions they're missing.
That's the whole premise upon which this website was built. There ought to be a version of the Khan Academy for the ACT. So now there is.
I'm an expert tutor with over 10 years of experience. I've taught abroad and domestically. I've worked for all the big-name companies, including Compass Prep, Princeton Review, and Varsity Tutors. I saw that all of these companies were concerned first with billing, second with improving a student's test score. I also wrote content for several companies, including the Princeton Review.
Why People Expect a Khan Academy for the ACT
Khan Academy built out a whole model of free teaching online. Most of the content is genuinely great for subject matter knowledge. I actively encourage students to use Khan Academy for basic math and grammar because that's what Khan Academy is great at. Sal Khan is an excellent teacher, but he's not a tutor, and there's a difference.
Sal Khan has never had to sit between students who want help, parents who feel like they're overpaying, and test prep managers who literally see you as a line item. This sort of pressure cooker situation requires tutors to prioritize session work like crazy. That usually means diagnosing exactly what a student is missing and why. The why is critical. Students have all sorts of preconceived notions and limiting beliefs. If a tutor can help a student work through these things insofar as they impact academic performance, then great progress can be made. That's part of the reason why a good tutor is so valuable.
They're not teachers. They don't teach the same curriculum to 30 kids, several times a day, 5 times a week, each school year. Instead, tutors have insane domain knowledge about a very particular test or two, which they then use to calibrate against how a student does. These are two totally different jobs. And Sal Khan at Khan Academy does better than I'll ever do at being a teacher.
What Khan Academy Actually Helps With
Here's the part most "Khan Academy for the ACT" articles get wrong: the content overlaps, but the test doesn't. Khan's own ACT overview video admits this. The math and science you learn there is the same math and science the ACT is built on. So for shoring up an actual knowledge gap, like a kid who never really locked in factoring, or comma rules, or reading a data table, Khan is great, and free, and I'll send students there myself.
What Khan can't touch is everything that makes the ACT the ACT: the pacing, the answer-choice traps, the way the Reading section orders questions to trip up even strong readers. A student can master every concept on Khan and still walk out with the same score, because the thing limiting them was never the content. It was the format. And format is exactly what a generic video library can't diagnose.
The "Official" Free Course, and Its Limit
The Kaplan "Official" course does exist. It can be helpful, but I wouldn't pay money for the paid version if I were a parent. First of all, Kaplan's books are always meh. They're generic, sure, but the bigger problem is that the practice questions are just different from the real test. Close enough to feel right, off enough to train the wrong instincts. I would never use one in class, even though they're an official ACT partner.
Second, the course is generic. Despite being a test prep company, generic self-paced courses run into some of the same problems as classroom teaching: they're not doing the same job tutoring does. So rather than pinpointing specific errors, like my website shows you how to do in ACT reporting categories explained, the course runs the gamut of making your student study all the content whether or not they actually need it. That's incredibly inefficient. A kid who's already strong in algebra doesn't need to sit through algebra lessons; he needs to find the three reporting categories quietly bleeding his score.
One thing worth separating clearly: there are two versions of the Kaplan course. The paid version is the one I wouldn't buy. The other is free, but only to students who qualify for an ACT fee waiver. That's genuinely nice for the families it reaches. But it's a narrow door. My entire website is free to everyone, no waiver, no account, no catch.
What None of These Can Do
Every other resource is one-size-fits-all. None of them starts from your child's actual score report. And to be fair, most generic tutoring doesn't either. Plenty of tutors run the same canned curriculum a self-paced course does.
Here's the mechanic that's missing, and it's the whole thing.
You start with the score report. Not the composite, but the reporting categories underneath it, the ones that tell you which skills are costing points. From there, you can see exactly how many points the student needs and where they actually live. Then you build a plan around that gap, band by band, targeting the specific weaknesses, skipping everything the kid already owns. Then, once they're ready to study, every piece of content they need is available free, organized by score band, live on this site.
That's the version of Khan Academy for the ACT that should have existed. It reads the individual kid instead of teaching at all of them, and it's free to everyone, which, as far as I know, no one else is doing.
If you want it done with you instead of by yourself, the free consultation includes a Precision Point Map: a week-by-week plan built from your child's real diagnostic or score report, targeting the exact weaknesses showing up in their results.