In a college-entrance-exam landscape long dominated by the SAT and the ACT, a relative newcomer has started to gain traction—especially in red states.
The Classic Learning Test, first unveiled a decade ago by the for-profit company Classic Learning Initiatives, assesses high schoolers’ verbal reasoning, grammar and writing, and math skills, just like its competitors do. But unlike the other tests, the CLT draws its reading-comprehension passages exclusively from “classic” works—a difference it claims provides “an invaluable opportunity to engage students with the texts and authors that have shaped history and culture.”
Originally accepted primarily by small and religious colleges, its reach hasn’t been broad. But that’s slowly changing.
In 2023, Florida’s state university system approved the exam for undergraduate admissions to its 12 public universities, the first state to do so. The number of test-takers has since ballooned, according to the company. While about 24,000 students took the test between 2016 and 2023, an additional 500,000 took it as of this fall.
This month, Politico reported that the nation’s service academies will accept the test for the 2027 admissions cycle. Lawmakers in Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and Wyoming passed legislation this spring encouraging its use in college admissions and state-funded scholarships.
The Classic Learning Test has won the favor of some Republican politicians who promote a “back to basics” approach to education. Its board includes Christopher Rufo, the Manhattan Institute senior fellow who has been a leading voice in the movement to ban “critical race theory” from K-12 schools, and representatives from the conservative American Enterprise Institute; Hillsdale College, a private Christian liberal arts school; and the conservative education media company PragerU.
But what’s actually on the test, and how different is it from other entrance exams? This explainer will explore how the exam defines “classic” works, why it’s become associated with a conservative political movement, and questions about how comparable it is to other tests of students’ college readiness.
What is on the Classic Learning Test?
The test, known as the CLT, is a college-entrance exam geared to 11th and 12th graders. It covers reading, writing, and math content, and takes about two hours to complete. Students take the test online.
Like the SAT or ACT college-entrance exams, students are asked to read individual passages and answer comprehension questions during the reading portion. From the perspective of a test-taker, “the tests are very similar,” said David Blobaum, the co-founder of Summit Prep, a test-preparation company in New Jersey that offers tutoring for all three tests. (All tests cost roughly $70 to take.)
The main difference in the reading sections is the passages themselves. The CLT draws its text from authors whom its board have deemed “shaped history and culture,” including secular and Christian religious works from the ancient, medieval, early modern, and late modern periods. The writings of Plato and Aristotle, epics like Beowulf and Dante’s Inferno, and the work of Christian saints and philosophers all appear on the test’s public author bank.
Testing students’ ability to understand classic works, as the CLT does, assesses their readiness to engage with the Western intellectual tradition that has shaped much of the literature, politics, and philosophy students might study in college, said Jeremy Tate, the founder and CEO of the Classic Learning Test.
“Students need to have a deep understanding of these texts, or you can’t be educated in any serious sense,” he said, in an interview with Education Week.
The excerpts students see are longer in the CLT, compared with the new digital SAT’s 25-150 word passages. The longer excerpts, typically around 500-600 words, better evaluate students’ ability to engage with dense text, Tate said.
It’s an assertion the College Board, which administers the SAT, disputes. Passages on the new SAT still meet the same levels of text complexity, said Priscilla Rodriguez, the College Board’s senior vice president for college-readiness assessments. Internal research shows the digital test “remains highly predictive of students’ readiness for and performance in college,” she said.
The CLT math section tests algebra, geometry, and mathematical reasoning and does not allow a calculator. The SAT and ACT, by comparison, both additionally include statistics in their math sections, and allow calculators for part of or the whole test.
How popular is the CLT?
The CLT is accepted by more than 300 colleges and universities, listed on the company’s website. Most are Christian schools. (Anecdotally, said Blobaum, the test-prep company CEO, the students who take preparation courses for the CLT are largely from private religious K-12 schools.)
The company reports that about 500,000 students took the test between 2023 and present. For comparison, about 1.97 million students in the high school class of 2024 took the SAT in a single year, according to the College Board, and about 1.4 million high school seniors took the ACT in the same year.
Why has the CLT gained traction with conservatives?
The test has garnered praise from some Republican politicians. U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called the CLT the “gold standard” in a post on X in May. Sen. Jim Banks, a Republican from Indiana, told Politico that the service academies’ acceptance of the test was a “victory for merit and America’s future leaders.”
Oklahoma schools chief Ryan Walters, who has requested a waiver from the U.S. Department of Education to add the CLT—along with the SAT and “innovative benchmark assessments"—as alternative assessments for federal accountability measures, has also praised the test. “We see classical learning as a very exciting return to the basics,” Walters said in a January state board of education meeting.
Growing interest in classical learning invokes a long-standing debate in English classrooms about what authors students should be asked to read and who gets to be included in the “canon,” the list of literary works deemed to be the most important or influential.
Some educators argue that students should be exposed to texts that have endured for hundreds or even thousands of years, either because they have inherent literary merit or because the ideas therein underpin so much of contemporary works and discourse.
Others say that students should have the opportunity to read more modern books that may speak more directly to their own experiences and whose authors tend to represent a wider array of racial and gender diversity.
Data suggest that many middle and high school teachers employ a mix of both approaches; for instance, pairing Shakespeare with a young adult novel written this decade.
Tate, though, views the CLT as a “lever” to shift the balance toward the classics.
His prior career teaching in New York City left him with the impression that public schools were in a “spiritual moral crisis” that could be solved in part by studying classic texts, with the goal of developing students’ virtue and character.
For critics, though, this can seem like an attempt to scrub racial and gender diversity from the curriculum, and bring schools back to “the ‘40s and ‘50s” when students mostly read white authors, said Steve Sireci, a professor in the psychometrics program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
When asked about the test’s association with conservative politics, Tate said that classical education can, and should, be a big tent. “We’ve got people left, right, and center,” he said, of the CLT board.
“I love the fact that Pete Hegseth loves CLT,” he continued. “But I do think, as Cornel [West] says, it’s a human inheritance,” Tate said, referring to the philosopher and political activist. West is also a member of the CLT board.
Still, in other interviews and op-eds, Tate has adopted culture-war framing, calling classical education an alternative to “mainstream progressive nonsense,” a corrective to what he has referred to as “‘critical race theory’ curricula.”
What readings are on the CLT? How do test creators determine what counts as a “classic”?
The CLT provides an author bank, from which two-thirds of the text selections on the exam are drawn. The list was first derived from the readings assigned to students at St. Johns College in Annapolis, Md., where undergraduates follow a “great books” program, and Thomas Aquinas College, a Catholic school in Santa Paula, Calif., Tate said.
The board has since revised and added to the selections, which include a variety of 19th and 20th century authors and intellectuals: Virginia Woolf, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, C.S. Lewis, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison, as examples.
It’s a misconception that classical works are solely by white authors or about Western cultures, said Anika Prather, an assistant professor of education at the Catholic University of America and a member of the CLT board.
Prather studies the Black classical tradition, the way that authors and intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois, Frederick Douglas, and Martin Luther King Jr. made connections to Greek and Roman works in their writing.
“We begin to see a repeated reference of that literature in Black literature. And on the flip side of that, a repeated reference of Africa in classic literature,” she said, noting that the Greek historian Herodotus wrote extensively about the Middle East, and the Greek philosopher Pythagoras studied with Egyptians.
Avoiding these intercultural connections, what Prather called “erasing any color within that tradition,” leads to a misunderstanding of the works and their enduring significance, she said.
Does the CLT predict college success with the same accuracy as other college-entrance exams—namely, the SAT?
Entrance exams are designed to show universities how well prepared students are for college-level work. The SAT, which has decades of research demonstrating a connection between students’ scores on the test and their success in higher education, is “among the best predictors we have,” said Bruce Sacerdote, a professor of economics at Dartmouth College.
That doesn’t mean that the CLT couldn’t be as predictive, Sacerdote said, just that we don’t have large-scale evidence either way.
The CLT has published its own concordance report with the SAT, claiming that the two tests assess similar enough skills to be comparable. The College Board disagrees. It has released its own brief, arguing that the CLT’s report doesn’t meet industry standards.
Some states have recognized the CLT as an equal alternative to the SAT. Arkansas, for example, has ordered all public institutes of higher education that use the SAT or the ACT for admissions to accept the CLT to the same extent.
Other states have not. Last year, the Iowa Board of Regents conducted a review that found “no evidence to support the predictive efficacy of the CLT.” The board recommended that the CLT not be used as a criterion for automatic admission to Iowa’s public universities, as the ACT and SAT are for Iowa residents.
