Classical Learning Test
We’ve Been Teaching the CLT Since Before Most People Had Heard of It. An Honest Take.
Something unusual happened this week. The Washington Post ran a major story on a college entrance exam whose reading passages come from Plato, St. Augustine, and Shakespeare. Within days, outlets across the country had picked it up. For anyone who has spent the last several years watching the Classic Learning Test grow quietly from the margins of American education toward something that looks, increasingly, like the center, this week felt like a reckoning.
The CLT has been national news before, in fragments. But the convergence of headlines arriving this April is different in kind. The Pentagon announced that all U.S. military service academies will accept CLT scores beginning with the 2027 admissions cycle. Indiana enacted legislation requiring its state universities to consider the CLT alongside the SAT and ACT. The University of North Carolina system, including the flagship campus at Chapel Hill, agreed to accept it. Arkansas signed a contract worth up to $12 million to offer the exam in high schools statewide. Ohio has a bill moving through its legislature now. More than 300 institutions accept CLT scores. The test that began with 46 students a decade ago is approaching 250,000 annually.
Clayborne has been preparing students for the CLT since before most families had heard of it. That history gives us a particular vantage point on this week’s headlines. I want to try to say clearly what this moment actually means, and what it doesn’t.
What the CLT Is, and Why It Was Built
The Classic Learning Test was designed as a deliberate alternative to the SAT and ACT, not merely harder or easier, but philosophically distinct. While its competitors draw their reading passages from contemporary journalism, environmental science reports, and social studies excerpts, the CLT reaches further back. Students encountering its verbal sections will read, for example, Aristotle on ethics, John Henry Newman on the nature of a university, or Flannery O’Connor on the vocation of fiction. The mathematics is rigorous and unapologetically traditional. The test, in other words, reflects a particular view of what educated minds should be able to do: engage with the great ideas of Western civilization, reason precisely, and read difficult things closely.
This is not incidental; it is, in fact, the point. The CLT’s creator, Jeremy Tate, has argued for years that the content of a test shapes what schools teach and what students think preparation looks like. If the exam rewards close reading of primary sources, students will read primary sources. If it rewards the ability to follow an argument across centuries, schools will teach students to follow arguments. The test is, in that sense, a curriculum in disguise.
That framing has made the CLT beloved in classical Christian school communities, among homeschooling families, and within networks of educators who feel that something important was lost when the Western canon was displaced from the center of secondary education. It has also made the test politically contentious (like most things these days!).
One common charge is that the CLT is “exclusionary.” It’s a concern worth taking seriously — and one the CLT’s own design addresses directly. Consider the CLT’s author bank, the list of authors from whom it draws for reading and writing passages. Formulated under the direction of UVA professor Angel Parham (among others), the CLT author bank presents a kaleidoscope of authors and viewpoints. The Western tradition, as the CLT defines it, is not a settled or closed canon — it includes dissenting, heterodox, and contested voices, because that is what the tradition actually contains when you look at it honestly. (How, indeed, a test that prominently features Marx and Nietzsche can be portrayed as uniformly pro-religion is hard to fathom.) Meanwhile, the CLT is inclusive in an underappreciated sense: it refuses to exclude authors from the past, even the distant past. One thinks of the famous quote by G.K. Chesterton: “All [lovers of democracy] object to [people] being disqualified by the accident of their birth; tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of their death.”
Two other critical concerns have more merit. The first is that the CLT is vulnerable to cheating because of its remote testing modality. This suggestion is certainly possible; only time will tell. But there has been no documented cheating scandal thus far.
The second somewhat legitimate charge concerns the lack of data to support the CLT’s data. As a young test (only 10 years old), it finds itself in the position of the recent college graduate who cannot get a job because she lacks experience, who then justifiably complains, “How can I get experience if no one will give me a job?” The CLT cannot be expected to provide a depth of data it does not yet possess. That said, I respect the “wait and see” stance taken by the state of Ohio; state governments are certainly justified in pausing full acceptance until there is an opportunity for further due diligence. As anecdotal testimony, I can affirm, as someone with over twenty years of experience scrutinizing tests, that it holds up very well, rigor-wise, in comparison to the ACT and SAT.
As a last note on the politically contentious nature of the test, I consider it unhelpful to frame the CLT as favoring one side of the political aisle. There is, without doubt, a strong correlation between a center-right political affiliation and statewide acceptance of the CLT. But I consider this largely a consequence of how social and professional networks tend to operate. Properly understood, the decision should not be political or controversial, and I am confident that, eventually, it won’t be.
What This Week’s Headlines Actually Show
The expansion of CLT acceptance is not primarily a story about politics, even if politics accelerated it. It is a story about what institutions are willing to recognize as evidence of academic preparation, and that question matters enormously for families navigating college admissions.
When the Pentagon decides that a student who scored well on passages from Dante and Aquinas is prepared for the Naval Academy, it is making a substantive claim about the relationship between classical education and institutional readiness. When UNC Chapel Hill, a flagship public research university with no particular ideological profile, agrees to accept CLT scores, it is doing something more interesting than political signaling. It is acknowledging that 250,000 students a year are taking an exam that deserves to be taken seriously.
For families in classical schools and homeschool communities, this week’s news is meaningful in a specific and practical way. The gap between the education their children receive and the tests those children are expected to sit for has always been real. A student who has spent years with Cicero and Euclid and Aquinas reads differently than a student whose curriculum has been optimized for the SAT. That difference used to work against classical students on college applications. It is beginning, in some places, to work for them.
What We Tell Students Who Ask Whether the CLT Is Worth It
The question we get most often, once a student or family has decided to explore the CLT seriously, is this: Should I take the SAT or ACT as well, or can I rely on the CLT alone?
The honest answer is that it depends, and that the landscape is changing quickly enough that any answer I give today may need to be updated in a year. For students applying to the 300-plus institutions that already accept CLT scores, particularly the military academies and growing numbers of state universities, a strong CLT result is a genuine asset. For students applying broadly, including to selective schools that have not yet adopted the CLT, it is generally safer to stick with the SAT or ACT. However, because a strong CLT score can be submitted as a “differentiator” at high-ranking colleges, some students might want to consider a strategic plan that incorporates both the CLT and one of the traditional exams.
It should be clear that this post is not an argument that every student should take the CLT. But it is an argument that the exam takes its subject matter seriously, and that students who take it seriously tend to flourish and to distinguish themselves from their peers.
A Pioneer’s Note
When Clayborne began offering CLT preparation, we were doing so before most test prep companies had noticed the exam existed. That early investment was not a business calculation. It was a reflection of what we believe: that how students are prepared for tests shapes how they think about learning itself, and that a test built around the Western intellectual tradition deserves to be taught by people who love that tradition.
This week’s news does not change that conviction. If anything, it confirms it. The CLT is no longer a niche. What was once the choice of a few thousand families committed to classical education is becoming, slowly and imperfectly, part of the broader American conversation about what college readiness actually means.
That conversation is worth having. We are glad to be part of it.
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