Public universities in Texas can immediately start using Classic Learning Test (CLT) scores for in-state applicants who fall outside the state’s automatic admissions window, Texas’ higher education commissioner, Wynn Rosser, decided Thursday, July 23.
The CLT exam is gaining traction in Republican-led states, with universities in Florida and Arkansas already having adopted the exam for their admissions. Created in 2015, it promotes itself as an alternative to the SAT and ACT that draws its reading-comprehension passages exclusively from “classic” works and authors “that have shaped history and culture.”
Its author bank, which makes up two-thirds of reading and writing passages on the exam, includes authors such as C.S Lewis, Martin Luther, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Mahatma Gandhi. It also includes poems such as “Beowulf,” which the exam says “fuses two worlds, pagan and Christian, with an effect seldom rivalled in any other literature.”
The reading passages used in the test are also much longer than the SAT or ACT.
According to the exam website, more than 350 colleges and universities currently accept CLT scores, with a vast majority being private Christian schools.
Gaining traction with conservatives
Critics argue the exam relies too heavily on Western cultures, which has been a similar argument against new social studies teaching standards in K-12 Texas public schools that were passed by the State Board of Education in June.
Jeremy Tate, founder and CEO of the CLT, recently told the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board that his exam aligns with the state’s new social studies standards and instructional materials, according to The Texas Tribune. Tate added that approving it would create an educational pipeline that “honors the pursuit of truth, goodness, and beauty,” the Tribune reported.
Tate has also publicly pushed culture war rhetoric, claiming that it’s “increasingly common for school districts to advance alternative versions of American history that focus almost exclusively on the nation’s faults rather than its exceptionalism,” in a 2021 op-ed, and has been touted as leading the “conservative education reform movement.”
Republicans in President Donald Trump’s administration have praised the test, with US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth calling it the “gold standard” in a social media post last year. Christopher Rufo, a conservative activist who spearheaded the national political movement against “critical race theory” in K-12 public schools, sits on the CLT’s board of academic advisers.
While Rosser claimed the the CLT, SAT, and ACT are of “sufficient rigor and reliability to be used as criterion for college admissions in this state,” the Texas A&M Public Policy Research Institute conducted a review of college entrance exams, warning that the three tests were not “equally ready, equally comparable, or equally defensible” and that the CLT was “less mature than the SAT and ACT.”
The review also examined how well each test’s scores could predict students’ college performance, and the CLT received 1.4 out of 4 possible points, compared with 3.8 for the ACT and 4 for the SAT.
Right now, only in-state applicants are able to use the exam. But in his statement, Rosser said the board will formally approve the CLT by fall 2028 as a new test option for home school, private school, or out-of-state applicants as well.
The exam costs $112, and is proctored remotely and taken at home. In comparison, the SAT costs $68 and the ACT costs $70.
