Conservative Rival to SAT Continues to Gain Ground

A third entrant is muscling into the college-testing game—and it's bringing Plato along. The Classic Learning Test, launched in 2015 as a conservative-backed alternative to the SAT and ACT, has won recent approval from the Pentagon for military service academies, and from Indiana's public universities and the University of North Carolina system, reports the Washington Post. The exam leans heavily on Western canon texts—think Dante, St. Augustine, and Shakespeare—bans calculators, and can be taken at home, a setup that has made it particularly popular with Christian schools and home-schoolers. For years, in fact, the test was "relatively niche," notes a previous story at Inside Higher Ed. But acceptance by the military in particular is seen as a big victory for the exam, even as questions linger about how well it works.

Supporters say the CLT demands tougher reading and math and could nudge K-12 schools back toward "classic" texts. Critics counter that its author list risks sidelining other perspectives and presenting what one scholar calls a "sanitized and triumphalist" take on history. Researchers also note a lack of independent, peer-reviewed evidence that CLT scores predict college success as reliably as the SAT and ACT. "We're lacking evidence on the CLT," says Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, an Arizona State University professor who is currently reviewing data on the test. Still, with Republican-led states such as Florida, Arkansas, and others adding the CLT for admissions or scholarships, test founder Jeremy Tate is betting big: His office plaque predicts the CLT will overtake its rivals globally by 2040.