A New Kind of Entry Test
Classic Learning Initiatives marked the 10th anniversary of its Classic Learning Test in October 2025 in the organization’s hometown of Annapolis, Maryland, hosting what its leadership called a retirement party for arch-rival College Board, which is celebrating its 100th. The dress code: 1920s style, with men sporting scally caps, bowties, and pocket watches and women in long dresses. It was a swipe at College Board’s SAT, launched in 1926 as the Scholastic Aptitude Test, which the CLT is determined to dethrone as the nation’s dominant standardized admissions exam by 2040.
These kinds of universal assessments date to a time when students were subjected to separate entry tests by different schools. In the 1930s, elite institutions began using standardized tests in the hope that such “aptitude” tests would help them identify promising candidates from public schools and diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. But as the number of Americans attending college rose and admissions offices relied more heavily on tests—the ACT (which originally stood for American College Testing) came along in 1959—the exams faced scrutiny for favoring wealthier students who attended better-resourced high schools and whose families could afford test prep and to pay to take the tests repeatedly for higher scores.
A few schools gradually stopped requiring the SAT or ACT, and almost all made them optional during the pandemic, when testing centers couldn’t operate. Even since then, with competition ramping up for applicants, nearly 2,100 institutions have continued to make standardized tests optional for admission, according to the organization FairTest, which is critical of these exams.
A small number of mostly selective universities, including seven out of eight of the Ivies, have resumed or announced they will resume requiring standardized tests. But most admissions offices have shifted to emphasizing grade-point averages, class rank, extracurricular activities, and other measures. This, in turn, has led to concern about grade inflation—a development that the testing companies have not coincidentally studied closely and reported. The average GPA rose from 3.27 to 3.38 from 1998 through 2016, according to an analysis led by a College Board researcher, and the proportion of high school students graduating with an A average went from less than 39 percent to nearly half, even as SAT scores fell. A separate ACT report says the average high school GPA increased from 3.17 to 3.36 from 2010 to 2021. These trends have continued since the pandemic, newer research shows, including studies by investigators at the University of Washington Center for Education Data and Research and the Education Policy Institute at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
These long-running debates continue to play out. Do grades say more about applicants’ abilities than tests do? Do tests benefit the wealthy? Do they predict success in college? Yet another study last year, by scholars at Brown and Dartmouth universities, found that ACT and SAT scores do, in fact, correlate with the academic performance of first-year students at selective colleges.
But test-taking has declined. About two million students in the high school class of 2025 took the SAT, below the more than 2.2 million who did in 2019, the last year before the pandemic; during the same period, the ACT dropped from nearly 1.8 million test-takers to fewer than 1.4 million.
Last year the research arm of the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT for College Board, not surprisingly proclaimed that “the future of assessment contains challenges.”
That’s the backdrop against which the Classic Learning Test was launched.
With a bachelor’s degree in secondary education from Louisiana State University and a master’s in religious study from Reformed Theological Seminary, which was founded by conservative Presbyterians, Tate says he was disillusioned when his students at a Brooklyn public school where he worked seemed less interested in the classics than in what they thought they’d need to know to get a good score on the SAT or ACT.
After leaving that job in 2014 to become a college counselor at Mount de Sales Academy, an all-girls Catholic high school outside Baltimore, Tate was again disappointed when not a single student signed up for an introductory philosophy class taught by “a very sweet Dominican nun.” When he asked them why, he says, “the number one answer from students was, ‘Mr. Tate, it’s not on the SAT.’” (Philosophy is also not among the 40 subjects for which students can earn college credits through College Board’s Advanced Placement, or AP, courses.)
He was incredulous, Tate says. “We can’t get our Catholic kids in Catholic schools to take philosophy” because they didn’t see a college admissions advantage. So Tate decided to create his own test to compete against the SAT and ACT. In 2015 he teamed up with David Wagner, a friend since 5th grade and an entrepreneur who had experience with startups, to establish Classic Learning Initiatives and create the Classic Learning Test. (Classic Learning Initiatives is for-profit. College Board is a nonprofit, with revenues of more than $1 billion a year; ACT, which was previously nonprofit, was acquired last year by private equity firm Nexus Capital Management and made for-profit.)
All three tests ask students to read text passages and answer questions about them. But the CLT’s biggest difference is that its readings come from classic literature, science, philosophy, religion, and history, based originally on the “great books” curricula of St. John’s and Thomas Aquinas colleges. Among others, these feature Sophocles, Homer, Confucius, Ovid, Chaucer, Martin Luther, Voltaire, John Milton, and Adam Smith.
Part of his motivation for the CLT, Tate says, derives from what he says he saw in Brooklyn and at Mount de Sales: that the content of college entry tests drives what’s taught in high schools. “If we wanted to change curriculum, we had to start at the test,” he said in a conversation published by the right-leaning education think tank the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
The CLT would later add 19th- and 20th-century authors and thinkers, including Jane Austen, Sojourner Truth, Karl Marx, Susan B. Anthony, Leo Tolstoy, Oscar Wilde, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mahatma Gandhi, Zora Neale Hurston, George Orwell, Langston Hughes, and Toni Morrison. This would chill the early enthusiasm for the test among some of its conservative backers.
The CLT organization says that, just as with the reading passages in the SAT and ACT, test-takers don’t actually need to have read these texts beforehand, since the multiple-choice questions are based on the information provided in them and are meant to assess students’ ability to understand each piece of writing. Most of the passages are just over 500 words—much longer than those on the SAT, though shorter than some on the ACT.
According to a sample test, these might include an excerpt from St. Teresa of Avila’s The Way of Perfection, first published in 1577, about the vow of poverty. “When I have least, I am the most free from care,” wrote the Carmelite nun, mystic, and religious reformer. Or something from Book IX of Plato’s The Republic (“How, without rules, is the tyrannical man formed out of the democratical”), paired with Federalist No. 63, from The Federalist Papers, about the need for a senate—a “temperate and respectable body of citizens, in order to check the misguided career and to suspend the blow meditated by the people against themselves.”
The grammar and writing section might draw from texts such as Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery, or Albert Camus’s Nobel Prize lecture.
Passages in the reading and writing section of the SAT, by comparison, are much shorter—roughly 50 to 100 words, judging from a practice test—and sometimes include a graph or table. They may be about space flight or how predatory beetles decimated non-native trees; or they may be passages from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, or the short story “Out There,” by Provincetown Players cofounder Susan Glaspell; or a complete poem by Black American author Angelina Weld Grimké.
Students who take the ACT might be asked to answer questions about a 300-word description of a Brazilian chef who promotes sustainable local ingredients or 200 words about Hrosvitha, one of Europe’s earliest-known women playwrights, who lived in the 10th century, according to a sample of that test; there are also passages exceeding 800 words, including one about hip-hop culture in New York and excerpts from Ann Beattie’s short story “Janus” and Michael Pollan’s book The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World.
Like the other tests, the CLT also has a math section covering algebra, geometry, and mathematical reasoning, but—unlike the ACT and SAT—not statistics. Also, students taking the CLT are not allowed to use calculators as they can on the other tests. College Board asserts that 25 percent of the math questions on the CLT, based on a published sample test, were below high school grade level.
All three exams cost about the same—$68 for the ACT and SAT and $69 for the CLT. The CLT is offered 15 times a year compared to seven for the ACT and eight for the SAT. The ACT takes just under three hours, the SAT about two hours and 15 minutes, and the CLT two hours and 20 minutes.
Some of the nation’s 3.9 million annual high school graduates likely take more than one of these tests, though neither the testing companies nor the National Association for College Admission Counseling say they track this data. A CLT spokesperson says it’s likely that many of its test-takers also take one of the other exams, since the ACT and SAT are still accepted by more colleges and universities. Particularly ambitious college-bound students required by their states to take the ACT or SAT in school might also take one of the other tests if they think it might improve their odds of acceptance at elite institutions, according to private college consultants, who sometimes recommend this practice but more commonly say it isn’t necessary.
The CLT is administered both in person at participating schools and remotely, in part to accommodate the many home-schooled students who take it. About a quarter of participating students take the test remotely, a CLT spokesman says. They can start at any time during a 12-hour window on scheduled administration dates. Although they and their screens are audio- and videorecorded for review later, the approach has drawn criticism from education policy analyst James Murphy, who worries about the potential for cheating, since students are allowed to have scratch paper and—says Murphy—it seems implausible that proctors could review the tens of thousands of hours of recorded video and audio.
Test experts also question how much influence college entry tests really have on what gets taught in high schools. “If kids would actually read those books, I’m all for that,” says Harry Feder, executive director of FairTest, who is also a former teacher. But Feder notes that students who take the CLT don’t have to read the books because the information they need to answer questions is right there on the test. It’s “a canard,” he says, that tests like these affect what’s happening in classrooms.
But CLT has tapped into a growing movement among schools and parents that are already teaching what it tests.
