Will the Classic Learning Test Shake Up College Admissions?

Beginning next month, a new test will join the SAT and ACT as an admissions option for prospective students applying to the United States’ elite service academies: the Classic Learning Test, an up-and-coming exam that focuses on passages from the Western canon. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth lauded the test in a post on X last May, writing, “The CLT is the gold standard, and our academies need to attract the very best.” 

Being embraced by the military was a major win for the young test, which was founded just over a decade ago in Annapolis, Md., minutes from the U.S. Naval Academy. For years, it was relatively niche, serving primarily as an academic progress exam for private classical schools, an educational movement that promotes the study of classic Western literature and other liberal arts. Some colleges and universities allowed it as an entrance exam, though many were test optional, meaning a student could submit their CLT score if they felt it bolstered their application.

That changed in 2023, when the State University System of Florida’s Board of Governors began accepting the CLT—in addition to the better-known SAT and ACT—as an admissions exam for its public universities, which all require test scores for admission, as well as for its flagship Bright Futures scholarship program.

Now, more than two years later, Arkansas and Oklahoma have followed suit, allowing submission of the CLT for admission to their public institutions, and students in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Wyoming can submit CLT scores for state merit scholarships. In addition, the University of North Carolina System recently began accepting CLT scores for students who meet a GPA threshold. The test has also become a darling of the conservative right, whose members argue that it is more rigorous than its competitors and can “restore merit” in higher education.

“While the SAT and ACT measure reading and math skills, the CLT gauges student critical thinking ability and knowledge by incorporating texts from classical works of literature and history into the reading comprehension sections,” wrote Jonathan Butcher and Lindsey Burke, directors of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy, in a September op-ed urging Hegseth to accept the test at the military academies.

But the test has its fair share of critics. While some question its focus on the classical Western canon, which often excludes most nonwhite, nonmale writers and thinkers, others take issue with the quality of the test itself. The College Board, the nonprofit behind the SAT, has argued that the CLT and the SAT are not comparable exams, as CLT claims; it has also criticized what it describes as CLT’s lack of test security.

Fighting the Common Core

Jeremy Tate first conceived of the CLT while running a test-prep business that contracted with several Catholic schools in Baltimore. He noticed rising demand among Catholic schools for a third college entrance exam option after the SAT in 2015 moved to align with the Obama-era Common Core standards, which many felt were incompatible with Catholic education. The standards, which were adopted by all but four U.S. states in 2009—though some later abandoned them—were controversial due both to their content and to the federal government’s involvement in curriculum, which conservative leaders thought encroached on state’s rights.

“That move was really unpopular with administrators [and] teachers at Catholic schools, Christian schools, home schools, classical schools,” Tate said. “Probably the biggest reason is just the [Common Core’s] bias against fiction and towards informational text.”

What we see as the ancient goal of education, really, for most of human history until very recently—the goal was always the cultivation of virtues. Virtues like generosity, kindness, patience.”

—Jeremy Tate, CEO and founder of the Classic Learning Test

He decided to fill that gap, developing a test based around what he calls “the most influential texts that have driven the development of society and culture and history for more than 2,000 years.” According to the CLT’s author bank, that includes everyone from ancient philosophers to America’s founders to 20th-century writers such as John Steinbeck and James Baldwin—though in the list of over 150 authors, only 11 were born after 1900. In a nod to the test’s Catholic origins, it also includes 16 saints.

Tate also hopes that the CLT will encourage K–12 schools to restore more classical texts to their curricula, citing the aphorism that instructors “teach to the test.”

“What we see as the ancient goal of education, really, for most of human history until very recently—the goal was always the cultivation of virtues. Virtues like generosity, kindness, patience. This was the purpose of education, and then also passing down this intellectual tradition,” Tate said. “And without that common grounding of an intellectual tradition, people lose the ability to even fight well. I think this has actually been the No. 1 source of civil discord and America’s inability to have a conversation with somebody across the aisle, because we don’t have founding first principles, we don’t have a common canon.”

Tate’s vision for K–12 education has precedent; Andrew Newman, an English professor at Stony Brook University who is studying high school English curricula in the United States, said that when English was first introduced as a subject area in K–12 schools around the turn of the 20th century, classes were very much focused on students’ knowledge of a particular set of texts.

In recent years, however, education has centered less on requiring students to read books than on developing their skills of reading comprehension, which is often practiced on informational texts. According to a forthcoming study that Newman co-authored, the number of books assigned each year by the average high school English teacher has dropped from four in 2008–09 to 2.7 today. Some researchers and educators, including Newman, attribute that shift in large part to the adoption of the Common Core, which emphasizes college and career readiness over studying literature and the humanities.

The focus on excerpts and informational texts has only intensified in a political landscape where teachers are given less freedom about what to teach, Newman noted.

“Today a lot of teachers and, I think, interestingly, especially in the South and so-called red states … the districts purchase online curriculum packages that the teachers often are expected to follow very closely, so they have very little autonomy in terms of what they’re teaching and how,” he said.

That conservatives are embracing a test that elevates the humanities may come as a shock to some; historically, many who identify as right-leaning have dismissed the arts and humanities as unimportant.

But Curtis Dozier, a professor of Greek and Roman studies at Vassar College and the author of the new book The White Pedestal: How White Nationalists Use Ancient Greece and Rome to Justify Hate (Yale University Press, 2026), argues that conservatives find resonance in traditional Western philosophical ideas, such as skepticism toward change and the belief that inequality is natural. And connecting those ideas with classical authors has given them “a veneer of prestige, sophistication and maybe even truth that makes these ideas harder to question and critique,” he said.

Even so, today’s so-called classical education isn’t strictly focused on Greek and Roman ideas, Dozier noted, and few classical K–12 schools actually teach students to read Greek and Latin. But the idea of classical thought has come to be entwined with conservative politics.

“In the current moment, we’re not really talking about the appeal of ancient Greece and Rome; we’re talking about the appeal of what ‘classical’ symbolizes and what meanings and, I would say, political orientations are connected with this idea of the classical,” he said.

Tate describes himself as conservative, and he doesn’t reject the idea that the test is conservative by nature. To him, that means trying to get back to an “ancient” way of educating students, one that is less concerned with career readiness than with teaching them to be virtuous and to appreciate beauty.

He says he’s frustrated with the way today’s Republicans have talked about the humanities, calling out Marco Rubio’s comments putting down philosophy majors during a 2015 presidential debate. But he said the COVID-19–mandated period of online learning in 2020 and 2021 served as a wake-up call for parents who didn’t realize how far their students’ education had drifted toward that career-readiness model.

“This is their entire childhood, formative years, 16,000 hours in this building,” he said. “What’s interesting is almost every parent, when they’re given the [explanation] of what a classical education is—like, ‘This is aimed at cultivating wonder in your child and curiosity and their love for learning and to develop them morally, to be honest and courageous and generous and kind’—it has a universal appeal. And that’s basically what every parent wants—left, right, center—for their kid.”

Technical Concerns

Despite the CLT’s success over the past two years, it faced a significant setback in 2024 when the Iowa Board of Regents rejected its use by applicants to the state’s public universities. A report by the board and experts at Iowa State University argued there was no evidence that the test was predictive of how students would perform in college. What research the CLT has released about the test’s validity, they said, wasn’t representative of the students who attend Iowa’s public universities, because most CLT takers are homeschooled or private school students.

The CLT has since publicized a report on 235 students from Grove City College, a Christian institution in Pennsylvania, which has accepted the CLT since 2017. The results show a positive correlation between CLT scores and first-year performance; students with strong scores on the test, particularly on the verbal portion, were more likely to have high grade point averages in their first year at GCC. The report did note that homeschooled students performed better on the test’s writing section than other students.

The test has also faced major criticism from the College Board, which argues that the CLT’s studies showing the test is concordant with the SAT are inconclusive. (In testing, concordance is the ability to map the scores from one test onto another, similar test, such as a 1400 on the SAT being equivalent to a 31 on the ACT.) According to Priscilla Rodriguez, senior vice president of college-readiness assessments at College Board, the SAT and ACT have long collaborated on their concordance studies to share data with one another and ensure students take the tests fairly close in time to one another. But the College Board didn’t play a role in the CLT’s concordance study, which included some self-reported SAT scores rather than official scores for every participant.

The CLT has fought back against those criticisms, saying their report meets the industry standards of a sound concordance study. They also completed an internal study verifying the self-reported data, Noah Tyler, the CLT’s chief financial officer, told Inside Higher Ed. He said that the SAT, ACT and CLT were once planning to work together on a concordance study, but the project got delayed. Since then, the College Board has been “completely nonresponsive” about moving forward with the study. (A College Board spokesperson told Inside Higher Ed the organization would be open to conducting such a study with the CLT once its other concerns about the test are addressed.)

Rodriguez also noted concerns about the security of the CLT, which students can take at home and is not proctored live. It has a 12-hour testing window, which she said opens the doors to students who take the test earlier in the day sharing questions with other test takers.

College Board experts have also criticized the math section of the CLT as being “considerably easier” than the SAT’s, omitting what Rodriguez described as “pretty foundational math skills from the areas of Algebra 1 and Algebra 2, data analysis and statistics.”

Tyler pushed back on both counts; while it’s true the test doesn’t use live proctors, students are recorded taking the test and those videos are all reviewed, he said. The company also uses an answer-matching software to ensure students aren’t sharing answers.

He also said that the test’s math portion may seem easier because the test has chosen to include questions focused on students’ grasp of things like the logic of math and the properties of numbers.

“Some of these items that aren’t extremely hard aren’t part of the upper level of Common Core math, because that’s not what we’re trying to test,” he said. “But they do separate the very-high-ability students from the lower-ability students.” The CLT also does not allow a calculator on its math portion, while the ACT and SAT do.

No independent researchers have yet studied the validity of the CLT. But Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, a professor at Arizona State University and an expert in educational assessments, is currently researching the CLT’s reports with some colleagues, Courtney Stone, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Grace L. Beall, a Ph.D. student.

Though their research is not yet complete, Amrein-Beardsley said the team has found some discrepancies in the data that concern them, particularly in the concordance study.

“They removed a large number of outliers, which essentially, actually, realistically and empirically artificially inflated the correlations between the SATs, ACTs and the CLTs. Now, they can make the claim that these tests are essentially similar—similar enough that the correlations are so high that they’re interchangeable,” she said. “But that’s false, because they don’t have any reason, empirical reason, to remove outliers. Outliers are key to understanding what the true correlation is.”

She noted that removing outliers is not standard in psychometric research, and that it was also concerning that the decision to remove the outliers was relegated to the study’s endnotes.

Tyler, the CLT’s CFO, argued that removing some outliers is a normal part of cleaning up data for such a study.

“We will exclude students that got a high score in an extremely short, unrealistically short period of time,” he said. “So we do some data cleaning where we think that some data might contaminate our numbers.”

Growing Interest

It’s undoubtedly a complicated time for a new test to arrive on the scene. Florida is the only state in the U.S. where all public universities require first-time students to submit standardized test scores for admission, though several other institutions have reintroduced the requirement in recent years after the vast majority went test optional when testing centers shut down during pandemic stay-at-home orders. That has included both Ivy League institutions—all but one have brought testing requirements back—and public universities, with several University System of Georgia institutions once again requiring test scores for the 2025–26 admissions cycle.

Still, according to FairTest, a policy organization that advocates against standardized tests, over 90 percent of the 2,248 universities they track are still test optional, with only six colleges newly requiring test score submissions this cycle. On the other hand, the Common App has reported a year-over-year increase in the number of students choosing to submit their scores this year, likely hoping to boost their applications to universities that accept, but don’t mandate, the scores.

Anecdotally, I’ve absolutely encouraged some students to take the CLT.”

—Jodi Furman, founder of College Smart Start

The test has now been an option for students applying to Florida universities for over three years, though it’s unclear how much it has caught on. Jodi Furman, an independent college counselor based in Florida and the founder of the firm College Smart Start, said she’s sure there are some students in the state who have chosen to take only the CLT, but so far, she hasn’t worked with any of them.

“Anecdotally, I’ve absolutely encouraged some students to take the CLT,” she said. “There are some really great pros about it; it can be taken remotely … [and] it seemingly is offered way more often than either the SAT or ACT individually.”

She’s even seen a handful of students do better on the CLT than they did on the SAT, including one who took it as a “Hail Mary” after getting the same score on the SAT four or five times.

The test’s reach is likely to expand. Texas passed a bill last year that was supported by the CLT to study which college entrance exams should be used by universities in the state, with the results expected in August 2025.” Republican lawmakers in several states, including Indiana, have already filed bills in their current legislative session to accept the CLT at public universities.

Tate hopes, of course, that the CLT will be adopted by more institutions, especially now that the country’s service academies are on board.

“We’re surprised that we’re already seeing an uptick—we have public schools calling us, [saying], ‘Hey, you know, some of our students want to apply to West Point or the Naval Academy, and we know they’re looking at [the CLT],’” he said. “I keep thinking … that we’ll get at least a little bit of love from the Ivies at some point. But so far it’s been crickets.”

(This story has been updated to clarify the legislative status of bills supporting the CLT in Indiana and Texas.)