Florida never adopted test-optional admissions. All twelve State University System schools require an SAT, ACT or CLT score by Board of Governors regulation. The choice is not whether to test. It is which test to train for.
Admission to Florida's public universities runs on a single state rule rather than twelve separate campus policies. Board of Governors Regulation 6.002 names the accepted tests directly: first-time-in-college students applying for admission must submit SAT scores from the College Board, ACT scores from ACT Inc., or CLT scores from Classic Learning Initiatives.
Three tests, listed side by side, with no ranking among them. No Florida public university prefers one over another, and none of them will hold an ACT against your teen. The choice is genuinely yours, which is exactly why it is worth making deliberately instead of by default.
This matters more in some Florida counties than others. Orange County administers the ACT as its state-required eleventh grade exam, and 79 percent of Orange County graduates take it, against 34 percent statewide. In Hillsborough the figure is 17 percent. So depending on where your family lives, your teen may already be an ACT student without anyone having framed it as a decision. The Orlando page covers what that means locally.
There is exactly one official conversion, and most of the tables floating around online are not it. ACT and the College Board built the current concordance together from 589,753 students in the class of 2017 who sat both exams, and their joint guide states that the 2018 tables are the only official concordance and should be the single source of reference.
They have not been revised since, and the digital SAT did not require a new one, because the 1600 scale did not change. Here are the conversions Florida families ask about most, alongside what each one means for Bright Futures.
| ACT composite | SAT equivalent | What it clears |
|---|---|---|
| 29 | 1330 | Florida Academic Scholars, 100% of tuition |
| 25 | 1200 | Medallion for the class of 2028 and later |
| 24 | 1190 | Medallion for 2027 and earlier only |
That 24 is worth pausing on, because it is the single most common question we get. A 24 ACT is exactly the Medallion line for a student graduating in 2027 or earlier. For the class of 2028 and later it is one point short, because Florida moved that line up. A junior sitting on a 24 today may be looking at a qualifying score or a near miss depending only on their graduation year.
Plenty of families rule out the ACT in about four seconds because their teen dislikes science. That reasoning was sound for years. It stopped being true in September 2025, when ACT made the Science section optional and removed it from the Composite score.
If your teen ruled out the ACT on that basis before autumn 2025, they ruled it out on a fact that no longer holds. The Composite is now English, Math and Reading. A student who is strong in those three and weak in science is no longer penalised for it.
That is worth revisiting for one specific kind of student: the one who runs out of time on the digital SAT. The SAT is adaptive and gives more time per question, while the ACT is faster and more straightforward. Some students are meaningfully better on one than the other, and until the science change a lot of Florida families never seriously tested the question.
You do not need a diagnostic service or a consultant for this. You need one free Saturday and two official practice tests, one from College Board and one from ACT. Both are free.
Sit them under real conditions. Phone in another room, timer running, no restarting a section she botched. Then compare percentiles, not raw scores. A 1200 and a 25 sit on completely different scales and tell you nothing side by side. Both official score reports print a percentile, and that is the only number that compares.
If the percentiles land within a few points of each other, the tests are equivalent for your teen and you should pick on logistics: which test your district gives during the school day, and which has more nearby test centers on the dates you need. If one percentile is clearly higher, that is the test, and the decision is made for the next two years.
Sources: Florida Board of Governors Regulation 6.002. Guide to the 2018 ACT/SAT Concordance, published jointly by the College Board and ACT Inc. ACT's September 2025 announcement making the Science section optional. Bright Futures thresholds from the Florida Office of Student Financial Assistance. Test participation figures from FLDOE Florida Report Cards, College Entrance Exams, 2024-25.
The most common mistake we see is splitting prep across both tests and moving neither score. Run the baselines, pick the test where your teen naturally sits higher, then put every prep hour into that one. Most of our Florida students choose the digital SAT, and our program is built around it end to end.
Bring their PSAT, SAT or ACT scores to a free 45-minute Strategy Session and we will settle it with data, then map the plan. Yours to keep either way.
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