In a Wall Street Journal editorial from Sunday, “Florida Takes the Classic Learning Test,” the editorial board praises Florida’s state university system for accepting the Classic Learning Test (CLT) as a standard college-admissions test, alongside the SAT and ACT. The editorial praised Florida for challenging “the national testing duopoly of the SAT and ACT.”
Is the SAT and the ACT a duopoly? Yes, but this is a rare case in which the minimization of choice is beneficial to both the purveyor and the consumer. The presence of several options negates the “standardization” of a standardized test. The benefit of a truly standardized test is that every student everywhere must take the same test and answer the same kinds of questions. The tests are designed to focus on the logical capacities of the test-taker, very much unlike AP tests, which test a student’s knowledge of particular content.
The CLT is something of a hybrid between the two. The CLT’s mission is thus: The “Classic Learning Test (CLT) exists to reconnect knowledge and virtue by providing meaningful assessments and connections to seekers of truth, goodness, and beauty.” (I quite like all of those things!) An online sample test asks students to read and analyze passages from Pope John Paul II, Aristotle, and other such texts from the Western tradition. Unsurprisingly, CLT’s “partner colleges” are almost entirely small, conservative Christian schools. In the same way that a student applying to an arts program must submit a portfolio of their work, schools with a classical, Christian ethos have every right to accept, or even prefer, test scores from an exam oriented toward that same ethos.
The simple problem is this: Most American universities are not Hillsdale or Grove City College. I can’t imagine many research universities or (secular) liberal arts colleges weighing CLT scores the same as SAT or ACT scores, simply because the CLT is designed to display acumen in a particular arena (classical Christian learning) rather than general intellectual ability. Most admissions officers are probably not enthused about CLT’s mission, not to mention those who want to throw out standardized testing altogether.
A few years ago, the University of California released a 225-page report highlighting the benefits of standardized testing to up the admission chances of underprivileged students. And this makes sense intuitively — while being the valedictorian of a tiny public school in Mississippi might not stand out against the transcript of a Northeast boarding-school student, the standardized test allows the former student to excel in the same plane as the latter student.
Certainly, there is the problem of the Big, Bad, Test Prep hegemony, whereby wealthy families can purchase the services of private tutors and classes to help Junior eke out an upper-quartile score. This is a brute fact of life — rich kids will always have access to privileges not enjoyed by their poorer peers. However, this does not subtract from the unique capacity of standardized tests to mitigate that problem by enabling gifted students from any background to display their critical-thinking skills. The proliferation of multiple “standardized” tests will create castes of test-takers, eliminating the major benefit of near-universality that standardized tests delivered in the first place. Sorry, Florida, you know what they say about good intentions . . .
Editor’s note: This post has been corrected to reflect the fact that the CLT does not include quotes from the Bible.