Do you have what it takes to achieve a high score on the CLT?
The Classic Learning Test is accepted by more than 350 colleges nationally (only three of them are in Maryland) as an alternative to the SAT and ACT. It’s known for long reading passages from classic texts, an approach its creators hope inspires students to do more critical thinking.
The CLT is scored out of 120 points, with questions weighted by difficulty. The test’s makers say a score of 100 is equivalent to a 1390 on the SAT or a 31 on the ACT. The College Board, which runs the SAT and ACT, rejects that assertion.
The CLT has three sections: verbal reasoning, grammar and writing, and quantitative reasoning. Every section has 40 questions. Students have 40 minutes to finish verbal reasoning, 35 minutes to finish grammar and writing, and 45 minutes to finish quantitative reasoning, which forbids the use of calculators.
Try your hand at a portion of the verbal reasoning section from a CLT sample test, with questions based on a reading passage the test categorizes as philosophy/religion.
Read the passage
This passage is adapted from John Paul II’s “On the Christian Meaning of Human Suffering,” first published in 1981.
[1] Even though in its subjective dimension, suffering seems almost inexpressible and not transferable, perhaps at the same time nothing else requires as much as does suffering, in its “objective reality,” to be dealt with, meditated upon, and conceived as an explicit problem. Therefore, it also requires that basic questions be asked about it and the answers sought.
[2] Medicine, as the science and also the art of healing, discovers in the vast field of human sufferings the best-known area, the one identified with greater precision and relatively more counterbalanced by the methods of “reaction” (that is, the methods of therapy). Nonetheless, this is only one area. The field of human suffering is much wider, more varied, and multi-dimensional. Man suffers in different ways, ways not always considered by medicine, not even in its most advanced specializations.
[3] Suffering is something which is still wider than sickness, more complex, and at the same time still more deeply rooted in humanity itself. A certain idea of this problem comes to us from the distinction between physical suffering and moral suffering. This distinction is based upon the double dimension of the human being and indicates the bodily and spiritual element as the immediate or direct subject of suffering. Insofar as the words “suffering” and “pain” can, up to a certain degree, be used as synonyms, physical suffering is present when “the body is hurting” in some way, whereas moral suffering is “pain of the soul.” In fact, it is a question of pain of a spiritual nature, and not only of the “psychological” dimension of pain, that accompanies both moral and physical suffering. The vastness and the many forms of moral suffering are certainly no less in number than the forms of physical suffering. But at the same time, moral suffering seems as it were less identified and less reachable by therapy.
[4] It can be said that man suffers whenever he experiences any kind of evil. Suffering expresses a situation in which man experiences evil and in doing so becomes the subject of suffering. Even when man brings suffering on himself, when he is its cause, this suffering remains something passive in its metaphysical essence.
[5] This does not, however, mean that suffering in the psychological sense is not marked by a specific “activity.” This is, in fact, that multiple and subjectively differentiated “activity” of pain, sadness, disappointment, discouragement or even despair, according to the intensity of the suffering subject and his or her specific sensitivity. In the midst of what constitutes the psychological form of suffering there is always an experience of evil, which causes the individual to suffer.
[6] Thus the reality of suffering prompts the question about the essence of evil; what is evil? This question seems, in a certain sense, inseparable from the theme of suffering. Man suffers on account of evil, which is a certain lack, limitation, or distortion of good. We could say that man suffers because of a good in which he does not share, from which in a certain sense he is cut off, or of which he has deprived himself. He particularly suffers when he ought in the normal order of things to have a share in this good and does not have it.
This passage has been excerpted and adapted from the original, including minor punctuation changes, spelling changes, and other modifications that have not substantially changed content or intent.
Answer the sample questions
About the Education Hub
This reporting is part of The Banner’s Education Hub, community-funded journalism that provides parents with resources they need to make decisions about how their children learn. Read more.
Comments
Welcome to The Banner's subscriber-only commenting community. Please review our community guidelines.