Does United States have Exam season?
Not observed here
The United States has no national university entrance examination. The SAT and ACT are run by private organisations — the College Board and ACT Inc. — not by government, and sitting them is not universally required; admission is decided institution by institution, weighing transcripts, activities, recommendations and essays, and since 2020 a large number of universities have gone test-optional, so even whether a standardised score is looked at is the university's own choice. The closest thing at federal level is NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the Nation's Report Card; but it is a sample survey used to track achievement trends nationally and by state, and it produces no individual scores at all — a student cannot receive one or use one. High-school graduation requirements, and whether any exit examination exists, are matters for each state. So there is no shared exam season in the United States: the measuring of an eighteen-year-old is dispersed across three years of school record and the separate judgement of each institution.
What is this topic?
Every country here runs a national test that decides university places, but how tightly that decision is compressed varies enormously. China squeezes it into two days, June 7 and 8. Brazil does the opposite, spreading it across two Sundays a week apart in November. India goes further still, dispersing subject papers across nearly two months. Japan and Taiwan run a two-stage system: one national test, then each university's own. The United States is the only place with no national entrance exam at all. The same question — how an eighteen-year-old should be measured — gets seven different answers.
Sources and dates
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