Nothing makes me more nauseated than a row of multiple-choice questions and empty bubbles. After I turned 18, I thought I’d never encounter that feeling again, outside of stress dreams about forgetting my No. 2 pencils. And yet there I was, hiding in a cubicle at work to take a test intended for high schoolers, demonstrating my understanding of apostrophe placement and verb tense, and comparing the definition of truth in passages from Nietzsche and JFK.

I was taking the Classic Learning Test, an alternative to the SAT and ACT. The test is only 11 years old, and was originally taken mainly by kids who were homeschooled or had attended private religious academies. But use of the test is growing at an astonishing pace in red states where there’s a belief that the SAT and ACT have neglected the Western canon in an attempt to become “woke.”In the past three years, public universities in Florida, Arkansas, Texas, Georgia, Indiana, and Iowa announced that applicants could submit their CLT scores in place of SAT and ACT results.

Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Wyoming now allow students to use their CLT scores to qualify for state scholarships. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth recently called it the “gold standard” exam, and starting this year, military-service academies will accept CLT scores too. Some 200,000 kids will take the test this year. The problem is that the test is too easy.

The CLT was created by Jeremy Tate. As a remedial-English teacher at a public high school in New York, and then a college-admissions counselor in Maryland, he had become disillusioned with the American education system and what he saw as its emphasis on preparing students for the workforce. “What every other generation was doing in education was fundamentally a different kind of project,” he told me. They were doing two things: “moral formation” and the “transmission of this cultural, intellectual, Western inheritance.”

College-entrance exams inform high-school curricula. Because the SAT and ACT emphasize rote reading and math skills, that’s much of what schools teach. But if students had to take a classical-learning test, Tate believed, schools would be forced to teach the Western canon.

In 2015, Tate opened the for-profit Classic Learning Initiatives and started administering the CLT. Students are recorded as they take the two-hour test online, to prevent cheating. The exam is divided into three sections: verbal reasoning, grammar and writing, and math. Most of the texts are taken from a list of classics beginning with The Epic of Gilgamesh and ending with Toni Morrison. The math section covers algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and mathematical reasoning.

Tate presents the CLT as more rigorous than the SAT and the ACT. The CLT is the only one that doesn’t allow calculators, and its reading passages are longer than those on the SAT. But his biggest sell is on the substance of the texts. The other tests, he argues, have altered their content to push “anti-Western left-wing ideology.”Tate’s objection is a bit surprising when you remember that, for years, criticism of the SAT and ACT has mainly been a left-wing phenomenon. Some progressives oppose all standardized testing as inequitable, giving an unfair advantage to children from wealthy backgrounds and cutting students with lower scores off from future opportunities, while also failing to measure qualities such as creativity and grit.

During the beginning of the pandemic, in 2020, many universities, including all of the Ivy League schools, made the SAT and ACT optional for applications. But since then, most top schools have reinstated the test requirements, finding that they’re the most reliable way to predict students’ abilities. Now, suddenly, the tests are being attacked from the other side.

Eventually, Tate intends for his test to dwarf the SAT and ACT. He has a long way to go; last year, 2 million graduating seniors had taken the SAT at some point during high school, and 1.4 million had taken the ACT. More than two dozen states, about half of which have Republican leaders, have all public-school students take the SAT or ACT. But Tate believes that Americans are waking up to the testing companies’ “hollowing out and politicization” of schools.

“I think word is getting out more and more among students that the SAT and ACT just aren’t really serious,” he told me. Although Harvard and MIT do not accept the CLT, Tate said that a growing number of students are submitting CLT scores to impress their admissions offices. (An MIT spokesperson told me over email that CLT scores are not considered in admissions decisions. The not was underlined.) Tate claims that the CLT, in contrast to the SAT and ACT, is not political.

Yes, Christopher Rufo, the anti-critical-ace-theory activist, is on the board of Classic Learning Initiatives. But so is Cornel West, the public intellectual who calls himself a “non-Marxist socialist.”“He’s a good friend,” Tate told me. (West did not reply to a request for comment.) There’s nothing partisan, Tate argues, about valuing rigor and revering old books. Recently, the CLT’s X account posted a collage celebrating what it called “arguably the 50 most influential books in history.”

The image appears to be AI-generated; it includes The Aeneid by “Virmer.”For the first eight years of its existence, only about 20,000 students took the CLT. But in 2023, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis got into a fight with the College Board over its AP African American Studies course, which he accused of indoctrinating students in left-wing ideology. DeSantis seized on CLT as an alternative. Florida began to allow high-school students to use their CLT score to apply to the state’s public universities and its biggest scholarship program.

Among students who weren’t destined for college, those who failed Florida’s end-of-semester exams could use a CLT score to fulfill their English and math graduation requirements. Over the next two years, Florida’s high-school graduation rate increased by four percentage points.

In school-board meetings, administrators credited the CLT for the boost. The superintendent of Hillsborough County, which serves more than 200,000 public-school students, called the CLT a “pretty big bullet.”More than 70 percent of the county’s seniors who could not pass the state’s math exam were passing the CLT’s math section. For the English section, that number was more than 30 percent. Many school officials think this is a good thing, presumably, because it makes the schools look better.

The CLT “allows students who never before would have gotten a high-school diploma to get a high-school diploma,” a Monroe County school-board member said in a meeting earlier this year. “It doesn’t have them college-ready, but typically those students aren’t heading to college, so this is enormous.”It’s unclear exactly how much of the rise in graduation rates can be attributed to the CLT; Florida’s Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment. But officials in at least seven other districts also claimed that the test helped students graduate, USA Today reported.

The graduation jump clearly suggests that the test is easier than the state’s own exams, but how the CLT measures up against other assessments is surprisingly hard to figure out. The Classic Learning Initiatives recently gave a team of independent researchers access to the test and the evidence behind it. The researchers—who work at Arizona State University, the University of Cincinnati, the University of Alabama, and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign—compared the CLT’s content with the SAT and ACT.

The group didn’t set out to measure rigor overall, but it found that of the three tests, the CLT contains the highest proportion of questions about number sense and pre-algebra, which are typically taught in middle school. (The CLT had about double the proportion on the ACT and six times the proportion on the SAT.) Noah Tyler, the CLT’s chief financial officer, told me that this finding doesn’t mean the test is easier. The math section emphasizes mathematical reasoning, he said. For example, one question asks students to determine how many numbers between zero and 400 are both odd and a perfect square.

“So even if it is some quote, unquote ‘middle-school content,’ it’s extremely hard. It’s dialed up to 11.” (The independent researchers confirmed that the CLT contained a higher proportion of reasoning questions.) The researchers found that the verbal-reasoning section was also less cognitively complex than the SAT and ACT. Some students might struggle with the exam’s classic texts, which can contain arcane references and convoluted sentence structures. But the CLT also includes passages from children’s books such as Peter Pan and Pollyanna.

And the questions themselves tend to ask for a lower level of inference and interpretation than the SAT and ACT, according to Mark Sulzer, an associate professor at the University of Cincinnati and a member of the research team.

Compared with the others, the CLT has more questions that direct students to a specific point in the passage and ask them to rephrase the information that’s already there, Sulzer told me.

My experience with the test confirmed this. It was daunting to start the timer and immediately plunge into a passage by Charles Dickens. But the questions—asking, for example, if a character delivered a letter with enthusiasm, annoyance, or another emotion—didn’t demand much understanding of the author’s work.

Tyler argued that the Florida graduation rate isn’t a fair measure of the test’s difficulty. Although many students pass Florida’s graduation cutoff, few earn a high score. A perfect score on the test is 120—40 on each section. Only 43 students got a 40 on the CLT math section in 2025, Tyler said. And none of them also aced the reading and grammar. “We wanted to make sure there were plenty of differentiators at the top. And so we left it hard,” Tyler told me. “We want to set an anchor and say: Let the whole world rise to the occasion.”

That may be true, but most aren’t taking the test to aim high. The company’s internal data indicate that about two-thirds of test-takers are using the exam not to apply to college at all but to satisfy Florida’s high-school requirements. To do that, they have to earn only a combined score of 36 on the verbal reasoning and grammar sections, and a 14 on the math.

The biggest problem is that it’s not clear what a good score on the test even is. Most companies that administer standardized tests go through a standard-setting process to determine which scores classify students into different proficiency levels. The company that administers the CLT hasn’t done that, the researchers said.

The company has put the test through a “concordance” process—basically, a way to determine what, say, a score of 85 on the CLT would be roughly equivalent to on the ACT (which has 36 total points) or the SAT (which has 1,600). The Classic Learning Institute told Florida officials that a 420 on the SAT math section—considered its passing score—was equivalent to an 11 on the CLT. That’s why Florida first adopted a score of 11 as the threshold necessary for high-school students to graduate.

But researchers say there were major weaknesses in the company’s process. How the institute determined the score was “so methodologically flawed, it’s, like, shocking,” said Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, a professor of teaching and learning innovation who heads the group of researchers studying the CLT. For one, Tate’s organization used fewer than 5,000 students to determine which SAT and CLT scores are equivalent, a sample size that is 100 times smaller than the one the SAT and ACT used.

The company could access official SAT and CLT scores for only about half of that group. The rest were self-reported. When the organization studied whether official scores lined up with self-reported ones for a group of students in that sample, it found that about a quarter did not match. “If they were to put any of these technical reports up for peer review, the peer reviewers would literally eat them alive,” Amrein-Beardsley told me.

Florida seems to have recognized that it set the bar too low. This year, the state raised the threshold to pass the math section to 14. The state, Amrein-Beardsley said, is just throwing spaghetti at the wall: “If it doesn’t stick again, they’ll try again,” she told me. “That’s not the appropriate way to do it, but that is the way it’s being done.”

Tyler objected to the researchers’ findings, saying that his organization hasn’t yet been given the chance to review their work. “Before really doing her homework or even releasing a draft, she’s got these grand conclusions about our project and whether we ought to cease and desist,” he told me. “That seems totally inappropriate to me.”

Amrein-Beardsley emphasized that nothing is inherently wrong with the content of the CLT. And more standardized-testing options could be a good thing. Her conclusion is “not that the CLT can never become a good alternative, but that the current evidence does not justify placing it on equal evidentiary footing with the SAT and ACT, especially for high-stakes uses.”The way to know for sure if a test is rigorous enough is to see how it predicts students’ college performance.

But because the CLT is only about a decade old, little evidence exists to show how test-takers do once they matriculate. Currently, only three studies have examined the question. Two compared CLT scores with first-year GPAs at Grove City College and Franciscan University, private Christian schools that prepare many of their graduates for the clergy. The third looked at how 259 students did in their first year at five small Texas universities. A team of Texas A&M researchers who analyzed the CLT reported that, while there was enough data for the scores to be factored into admissions decisions, more evidence was needed before the CLT could be considered as reliable an assessment as the SAT or ACT.

A confession: I breezed through the test’s reading and grammar sections, as well as through the beginning of the quantitative-reasoning section: If there are seven male and nine female chimpanzees, and six male chimpanzees are removed, what is the probability of selecting a female chimpanzee from the remaining group? But then I got to trigonometry and realized that I had forgotten everything I’d learned in high school. I already had a degree, I remembered, and was free to quit at any time. And so I did.

Critics on the left say that all standardized testing is tiring and time-consuming. Critics on the right say that these tests are still the best way to determine what students are capable of. I think they’re both correct. But if we’re going to require students to take these tests, we should at least make sure they’re worth the effort.

For years, red-state politicians have criticized progressives for eroding the education system in service of an ideological agenda. They’ve promised a return to high standards and accountability. And yet, more and more seem to be jettisoning their states’ best measures of accountability in order to win an ideological argument. Does anyone think this is going to work out well for students? The correct answer is no.