Students applying to U.S. service academies such as West Point and the U.S. Naval Academy will be able to use a standardized test other than the SAT or ACT in the upcoming college admissions cycle, opening the door to the Classic Learning Test as a new option.
The change gives the CLT, a test built around the Western Canon, its clearest federal-government win yet. Its English section includes passages from Virgil and John Stuart Mill, and the exam can be taken at home without a proctor during a 12-hour window.
Jeremy Tate launched the CLT in 2015 and has spent the years since casting it as a challenger to the older giants. He once described it as “kind of the Rudy or Seabiscuit” going up against the SAT and ACT, and said the major tests have been in “a race to the bottom” for decades. In his telling, “The dumber test gets the market advantage.”
The numbers show how far the CLT has come. Only 291 students took it in 2016. By 2024, that figure had jumped to 190,194 students, a rise that Tate and his supporters point to as proof that more families want an alternative. He has also argued that today’s applicants increasingly use test scores to separate themselves from other candidates, not just to clear a minimum bar.
The CLT was first embraced mostly by religious homeschoolers and Christian colleges, but it has steadily moved into state policy. Florida accepted it in 2023 as an alternative to the ACT and SAT for students applying to state schools and scholarships, and Louisiana, Oklahoma, Arkansas and North Carolina have also adopted it. Last year, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth called the CLT “the gold standard” on X.
Tate said some students now even send CLT scores to Harvard as an extra credential, despite the school not accepting the exam. That is the tension at the center of the test’s rise: it still trails far behind the SAT and ACT in total volume, but it is gaining ground fast enough to matter, and the service academies’ decision gives it a new stamp of legitimacy. For students who want another way to stand out, the CLT is no longer just a niche test for a small corner of higher education.
