The Defense Department is expected to announce shortly that the country’s service academies, including West Point, will soon welcome applicants to submit their scores on the Classic Learning Test, or CLT, a standardized exam alternative to the duopoly of the SAT and ACT. The CLT “will be accepted beginning in February 2026,” the West Point admissions website says.
The CLT was founded in 2015 and pitches itself as a standardized test rooted in the Western tradition. The reading passages draw from names such as Thucydides, Maimonides, Kant, Dickens and Orwell, and text excerpts can run 500 to 750 words. (The College Board, which runs the SAT, says its “passages in the Reading and Writing section range from 25 to 150 words.”) The CLT’s math portion doesn’t permit calculators. One example test gives this question: “If y^z=x and 8z=xy, then what is x+y+z if y is half the value of z?”
The CLT says it is accepted at more than 300 colleges, many of them Christian or private schools, but the company behind the test has also made headway elsewhere. Florida opened all its public universities to applicants with CLT scores in 2023, and Arkansas did the same this year. The classic test’s organizers say in 2024 it was administered 184,000 times.
Whether the CLT continues to spread will depend on its ability to compete, by making college applicants stand out while helping admissions officers decide which prospective students are likely to find academic success on campus. Will West Point and the University of Florida decide the CLT appeals to a different applicant pool or is otherwise useful in separating the brightest and the best?