Classical college entrance exam gaining ground

Georgia-born Sarah Catherine Grace took the SAT twice in high school. But to apply to New College Franklin, a private Christian university in Tennessee, Grace needed to take a different entrance exam: the Classic Learning Test.

The CLT covers subjects like reading, writing, and math, similar to the SAT and ACT. But unlike some modern standardized tests, the exam incorporates classic texts from authors such as Charles Dickens and Voltaire. “It didn’t feel like you’re reading about Jane and Jack throwing around the ball,” recalled Grace, now a freshman at New College Franklin. “It was very much thinking through it critically.”

Grace took the two-hour test and scored “somewhere in the range of 90 to 95,” which satisfied New College Franklin’s entrance requirements. The school is one of more than 280 universities that accept the CLT, an exam first offered in 2015.

The test has garnered its support mostly from school choice advocates because the entrance exam aligns more closely with the curriculum of some private and homeschooling programs. On March 18, Arkansas lawmakers passed legislation requiring state colleges and universities to consider the exam on par with other standardized exams in admissions and scholarship decisions. One week earlier, Oklahoma’s House of Representatives sent a bill to the state Senate that would allow students to qualify for in-state scholarships based on their CLT scores.

According to its creators, the test stands out from the SAT or ACT because of an emphasis on critical thinking that other standardized exams may lack. Noah Tyler is CLT’s chief financial officer. “There were some beautiful questions on the SAT before, and it became more algorithmic … more formulaic,” said Tyler, who offered SAT coaching in the early 2000s. “There was this alignment that was created between the Common Core and the SAT that really killed the fun.”

Common Core State Standards, launched in 2010, set educational benchmarks for public school students in 41 states and the District of Columbia. About a decade ago, the SAT and ACT started to emulate Common Core.

Adam Rasmussen is dean of the College of Arts and Humanities at Arizona Christian University, which accepts the CLT. Pointing to an annual nationwide college dropout rate of more than 30%, Rasmussen believes Common Core–based assessments haven’t proven to be reliable indicators of student success. “When we say we’ve got a system that is creating people that are college-ready, I would question that,” said Rasmussen.

The problems with modern standardized tests may predate Common Core. Leaders from 12 universities established the College Board in 1900 to standardize university admissions. In 1926, the organization first offered the Scholastic Aptitude Test or SAT, an assessment modeled after Army IQ tests.

Pepper Stetler is the author of A Measure of Intelligence, a book exploring the history of IQ tests. Stetler says some IQ-focused standardized tests ignore an important distinction. “Intellectual capacity is kind of like a biologically ingrained trait, whereas education is like testing whether you have been to school and you have received a quality education,” said Stetler. “Those things aren’t necessarily the same.”

Keith Nix is a CLT board member and head of Veritas School, a PreK-12 program in Richmond, Va. “I think [the CLT] does a better job of really understanding both achievement and aptitude in students in terms of reading, writing, comprehension, [and] quantitative mathematical thinking,” he said. But he acknowledged that the test better fits students who received a classical education. “If they’ve gone to a school, public or not, where they haven’t been asked to read difficult texts and do a lot of writing and thinking … then yeah, I think the CLT is going to feel very tough,” said Nix.

The test claims to be measurably similar to the SAT. In 2023, the CLT published a concordance study comparing the two tests and said they have a correlation of 0.89. So, students who score 1200 on the SAT might get an 83 on the CLT.

The SAT disagrees with that assessment. Last year, the College Board issued a statement saying the newer test’s concordance study did not meet industry standards. The organization also said the CLT hasn’t been around long enough to be proven dependable. “Until fundamental methodological and comparability issues are addressed, College Board cannot validate the interpretation and use of concorded CLT-to-SAT scores for high-stakes graduation, admission, and scholarship decisions,” the board told WORLD in an email. “An unsound concordance is unfair to all students.”

At the legislative level, the board has exercised some leverage, said CLT’s CFO Tyler, who pointed to the College Board’s lobbying efforts.

According to RealClearInvestigations, the board spent around $830,000 on lobbying in 2023. Lobbyists will likely keep up that pressure as testmakers vie for a diminishing market share. The Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education predicts that the number of high school graduates will peak this year and decline by 13% by 2041.

According to Tyler, students took 227,000 CLT exams last year. But with a growing number of states approving the exam, the College Board, which administered nearly 2 million SATs in 2024, could see the newer test cut into that number. Before Arkansas’ decision to allow the test as an alternative to the SAT or ACT, Florida became the first state to do so in 2023. In addition to Oklahoma’s bill, lawmakers in Texas, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Iowa are considering bills to implement the exam at publicly funded universities.

There’s more than market share at stake, since the CLT could influence what gets taught at the public school level if more districts decide to teach to a classically-based test. For now, the test remains most popular among members of its original target audience: private and homeschooled students like Sarah Catherine Grace.

“The nice thing was that I had gone through a lot of this with my schooling, because [I was] classically educated,” said Grace, who graduated high school through the online program Memoria Academy. “I just kind of had to brush up on a few things.”