Crucifixes and half-finished bottles of high-end bourbon line the shelves and windowsills of the headquarters for higher education’s next conservative darling.
The 200-year-old brick home in historic Annapolis feels more like a private club than an office where a staff of 70 runs the Classic Learning Test, an alternative to the SAT and ACT now accepted by more than 350 colleges. Stacks of books by authors like Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway flank leather chairs and velvet couches, setting the scene for the sort of intellectual discussion the test’s makers hope to inspire in students.
Founded in 2015 by a pair of Marylanders, the Classic Learning Test has become popular among Christian schools and homeschooling families across the U.S. and has logged more than 500,000 test-takers. Its founder and CEO asserts that the test, known as the CLT, is neither politically affiliated nor religious. But it has been embraced by conservative leaders, a sign that the college admissions process remains an ideological battleground.
“The CLT is conservative in some sense,” said CEO Jeremy Tate, “if you mean preserving and championing the ancient vision for education.”
Tate spent his teen years in Arnold and returned to Maryland in 2007 after earning a bachelor’s degree from Louisiana State University. He was working as a college counselor at Mount de Sales Academy in Catonsville several years later when he began to feel that the mainstream tests forced educators to ignore the classics, like poetry, Greek and Latin.
“These are all things that make a culture rich and substantial,” he said.
School should be about the “cultivation of wisdom, the passing down of an intellectual and cultural inheritance,” Tate said, rather than just test and job market prep.
“The testing really is the thing that shapes academic focus and curriculum at a secondary level,” he said. “If you change it, it has all these downstream and upstream implications.”
And so he created his own.
The CLT is structured similarly to the SAT and ACT, but with longer passages that test students’ reading comprehension skills. While SAT reading passages range from 25 to 150 words, CLT’s run 500 to 600 words.
The test’s academic board recommends readings to the test’s development team from authors they believe have “shaped history and culture” — like John Paul II’s “On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering” and Adam Smith’s “An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.”
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The academic board is packed with conservative leaders, including Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and activist Christopher Rufo, who was involved in the ouster of Harvard University President Claudine Gay and alleged that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating cats and dogs. The board includes some liberal viewpoints, Tate said, like Cornel West, an activist he called “as left as they come.”
Audrey Beardsley, a professor at Arizona State University who studies standardized tests, said the CLT has a “religious foundation that is very clear.”
“It taps into the conservative ideologies of today, the narrative that we’ve gone too far left and this type of test will take us more back to the right,” she said.
David Blobaum, co-founder and co-owner of Summit Prep, a test preparation company, said the CLT has “gotten lucky from the polarization in the country.”
There are a lot of conservative states, he said, who “want to give the middle finger to the SAT and ACT by accepting the CLT exam.”
Florida was the first. In 2023, the state’s public university system approved the exam for undergraduate admissions, instantly driving up the test’s popularity. Blobaum said that likely stems from Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ disdain for AP African American Studies, which is operated by the College Board, the parent company of the SAT.
Tate said his staff “doesn’t even try” to recruit Maryland schools to use the test. It’s “seen as a red state thing” by Maryland lawmakers, he said. Just three schools in the state accept it: St. John’s College, Mount St. Mary’s University and the U.S. Naval Academy.
The CLT is accepted at public universities in Oklahoma, Texas, Wyoming, North Carolina, Indiana, Georgia and Arkansas, but still lags far behind its competitors. Last year, 250,000 people took the CLT, compared to the 2 million who took the SAT and 1.38 million who took the ACT.
Blobaum said he tries to talk students out of taking the CLT, not because of a potential political or religious slant, but because he says the test is too difficult.
“I do not think it’s a good fit for an average student,” he said. “It’s very dense text.”
Most of the students he tutors who take the CLT are homeschooled or go to small Christian schools, he said. It’s especially popular among homeschoolers because the test is usually taken remotely. It’s also only two hours; the SAT takes 2 1/2 hours and the ACT takes three.
St. John’s, a private liberal arts school in Annapolis, was a good fit to accept the CLT because of its Great Books curriculum, said Ben Baum, the college’s vice president for enrollment. The curriculum requires that students read works from authors like Aristotle, Jane Austen and Homer, then discuss the text and ideas in a roundtable format.
“The model at St. John’s is to put people in a classroom having really tough conversations with each other about great books,” he said. “That only works if students have different perspectives and opinions. Part of our mission is to bring people who are different from each other to have those conversations.”
St. John’s acquires names of CLT test-takers and sends them emails and advertising for the college. About 10 students out of the 220 who enroll in the first-year class apply with the CLT each year, Baum said.
Accepting students who take the CLT is one way the admissions team at the college promotes viewpoint diversity, Baum noted.
“For us, it’s an opportunity to speak to an audience that’s hard to reach: homeschooled students and students from classical or religious schools,” Baum said.
Though Tate and CLT co-founder David Wagner chose history-rich Annapolis for their company headquarters, they’re considering Texas or Arizona for their next venture: a CLT equivalent to advanced placement, also known as AP, high school classes.
The expansion is part of CLT’s goal to one day overtake the ACT and SAT in popularity. A bronze plaque in the Annapolis office puts a date on it: 2040.
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