When the SAT is too hard, Florida students use the CLT to graduate
Held up as a new route to college admissions, the Classic Learning Test has instead become a remedial high-school graduation test in Florida.
The college entrance exam that Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth hailed as the nation’s new “gold standard,” promising to open doors at some of America’s most elite institutions, is instead seeing its heaviest use as a remedial high-school graduation test.
A USA TODAY investigation found that in Florida, the first state to broadly embrace the exam, the Classic Learning Test has become less a college admissions test than a graduation alternative for struggling students. School officials credit it with boosting graduation rates, while critics say it allows students to earn diplomas without demonstrating the skills – especially the math skills – Florida otherwise requires.
Since 2023, high school students who couldn’t pass the state’s reading and Algebra graduation exams — or earn qualifying SAT or ACT scores — have instead used the newer CLT to receive a diploma.
An analysis comparing the CLT, ACT and SAT math sections found the Classic Learning Test has a higher concentration of questions the researchers described as pre-algebra, or middle-school-level math.
If a student struggled with algebra or concepts beyond it, “I can conceive that they would have more success on the CLT because there’s a higher proportion of items that come in everything before algebra,” said Anna DeJarnette, a University of Cincinnati professor. She was one of five mathematics education experts who conducted the review.
Yet two years after Florida started its experiment with the CLT, the nation’s elite military academies and several state university systems have added it to their accepted college entrance exams.
USA TODAY scoured school board minutes and found officials in at least nine Florida districts attributed a rise in graduation rates to the introduction of the CLT in 2023.
At a May 2025 school board meeting, Christopher Bernier, superintendent of Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, told the board the CLT helped boost the district’s graduation rate by seven percentage points after its introduction in 2023.
“We’re hopeful that CLT will remain,” he told the board, “because it has been a game changer for some of our kids, who can’t seem to manufacture the ACT or SAT score.”
Students have a formula to beat the CLT’s math section, said Leesa Crescenzi, the former head of the math department for the Hillsborough County School District in Tampa. There’s enough pre-algebra material, she said, that a student can confidently answer several especially easy questions. Then they can pick the same letter, say, “B,” for every remaining question.
Nine times out of 10, she said, that got them a score high enough to graduate.
District records show that about 2,500 students in the Hillsborough district’s graduating class of 2025 satisfied their math requirement via the CLT, or roughly one in six. That’s true for thousands more Florida students in other districts.
“We’re saying, ‘Oh yay, they got it,’” Crescenzi told USA TODAY, “but we know they didn’t.”
How Florida school leaders view the Classic Learning Test
Jeremy Tate, CEO of Classic Learning Initiatives, the company that administers the CLT, and company CFO Noah Tyler told USA TODAY they’re aware the assessment is primarily being used as a graduation test in Florida. But Tate disagreed with critics who say the test is easier than the SAT or ACT.
The score needed to pass is up to the Florida Department of Education, Tate said. State officials say they set the passing score exactly where Classic Learning Initiatives suggested it would match the ACT or SAT. Still, they are slightly raising the score needed starting next year.
Previously, a student had to score an 11 out of 40 total possible points to graduate. Now, they’ll have to reach a 14. For the SAT, students need 420 points out of a possible 800 while College Board considers a 530 college ready. For the ACT, that figure is 16 points out of a possible 36 and they consider 22 college ready. The CLT does not have similar college level ready benchmarks.
Nadia Combs, a member of the Hillsborough County School Board, worries students armed with a diploma they earned via a CLT score could be entering college or the workforce before they’re ready.
“If they think they’re doing well and they’re passing,” Combs said, “but at the end of the day when they get a job or they go to college and they’re not able to do well on a typical test, that’s concerning.”
The CLT raised graduation rates around the state, said Vince Verges, an assistant deputy commissioner for the Florida Department of Education who oversaw statewide testing and retired in September 2025. The cut score, he said, was set based on information from test vendor Classic Learning Initiatives comparing their test to the ACT and SAT.
He said raising the cut scores this year will make the CLT more competitive.
“It was easier to get a passing score,” Verges said. “But now where the scores are, the bar is equally rigorous.”
Administrators at Hillsborough said in a July meeting the new standards so far had been harder for students to reach.
Meanwhile, at school board meetings across Florida, administrators touted gains in their graduation rates since the test was introduced.
“Our struggling students are more successful with the CLT,” said Bernier, the superintendent of Duval County Public Schools. That district’s high school graduation rate rose from 87% in the 2022-23 school year to just over 94% in 2024-25 after Florida added the CLT to its graduation tests.
Frances Celis, an administrator at the Lake County School District near Orlando, told her board in January 2025 that the district’s increased graduation rate was thanks to the Classic Learning Test.
“That test, the scores are very attainable,” Celis said.
One high school lagged, she said, but that was because the CLT was administered there less often.
In mid-July, the Hillsborough County School Board voted unanimously to offer the test to more students seeking to meet graduation requirements. Multiple board members acknowledged the test might be easier or less useful in college applications but said it was worth it to help students graduate.
“So if this [the CLT] is a little bit of an easier test that maybe breaks down that barrier, then I am going to support it,” one member, Stacy Hahn, said.
Even Combs, who expressed concerns about unprepared students graduating, voted to support the CLT “because it helps kids get across the stage, but I also don’t want people to think the CLT is this national, amazing test.”
What’s on the Classic Learning Test?
Though the reading sections most often drive controversies around the CLT, educators and students often told USA TODAY it’s the math section that makes the test easier.
Uzma Shaikh, a University of Central Florida student, found the CLT’s math section easier, even though, unlike the SAT, the CLT does not allow a calculator. It had more geometry questions and less about algebra or statistics.Shaikh, who attended the charter Orlando Science School, used her CLT score for her application to Central Florida, located in Orlando, and to obtain one of the state’s merit-based scholarships.
“I usually score really good with reading or with writing, but math is always like my shaky subject,” Shaikh said. “Being able to see that the math was easier than the ACT, SAT was something that really helped.”
On TikTok, on a post that reads “when you can’t crack the SAT, so now you studying to take the CLT,” commenters discuss answering all “C” to get a math score of 11 on the CLT to graduate high school in Florida. Others ask how to cheat, or give advice about how to do so.
The math section is so different it’s not even possible to compare the CLT and the SAT, said Priscilla Rodriguez, an executive vice president at the College Board who oversees the SAT. The CLT math section, she said, covers more middle-school math.
“The layman’s term would be ‘easier,’” Rodriguez told USA TODAY.
A 2024 sample of Florida’s Algebra 1 test shows questions that would require students to solve for a variable, interpret graphed equations and work with exponents and square roots.
If they couldn’t pass that test, their only recourse was a decent ACT or SAT score. Now, they can take the CLT.The CLT has algebra, but it also has other questions tied to topics students would have likely seen prior to high school.
Some are logic questions or pattern recognition. Others ask about prime numbers or ratios. Others are word problems that require no more than addition and division, such as this question from a 2024 practice test:
“A wedding reception has 16 tables and is set up for 126 guests. After the guests are seated, every table is filled except for one, which has two open spaces. How many chairs are at each table? (Note: each table has the same number of chairs.)”
Fourteen of the 40 questions on the math section address geometry, and the CLT includes a list of formulas and explanations of shapes. The SAT also lists some formulas. The ACT does not provide formulas.
The CLT’s 2026 technical manual even addresses the perceived easiness of some of its questions.
“One might be surprised to see a question about odd and even numbers, for example, on a test intended for 11th and 12th grade students,” the manual reads. “But one might find these questions among the most difficult for some students, because they ask for a working understanding of or intuition about number theory.”
The mathematics researchers who reviewed the ACT, SAT, and CLT found that the SAT had the highest density of algebra-related questions. Nearly 7 in 10 questions touched on the subject. Meanwhile, the ACT had the highest concentration of advanced math, which includes trigonometry, statistics, probability and precalculus.
The CLT stood out for its focus both on geometry and topics that are commonly associated with middle-school math such as division, patterns, ratios and fractions, said Evthokia Stephanie Saclarides, a professor at the University of Cincinnati. About a quarter of the CLT’s math questions fit into that category, 13% for the ACT and 4% for the SAT.
Can the Classic Learning Test predict college success?
At a 2023 virtual meeting of the board that oversees Florida’s state universities, Amanda Phalin, then a faculty representative, cautioned against adopting the Classic Learning Test for admissions. She said there was not enough research that said it could predict student success.
If Florida’s public universities used the test, she said, they should track the academic performance of students who submit a CLT score compared to those who submit ACT or SAT results. The board adopted the test with Phalin as the lone dissenting vote.
Three years later, no Florida university was able to provide performance statistics for CLT, ACT and SAT enrollees. Marnie Villanueva Marrero, a spokeswoman for the state university system of Florida, told USA TODAY it was too early to evaluate student outcomes because the first group of students is only in their third year.Tyler, the chief financial officer of Classic Learning Initiatives, told USA TODAY the test has been administered roughly 500,000 times. The company knows where students are sending CLT test scores, but not if those students are accepted or enrolled in classes.
“We haven’t followed them, surveyed them,” he said.
Classic Learning Initiatives points to studies from private, Christian colleges that show it can predict how students do in college. But a nearly two-month review of those studies by three academics shows they “are not yet representative of the broader college-going population.,” said Audrey Amrein-Beardsley, an Arizona State professor who has studied the ACT, SAT and now the CLT.
“They’re claiming that they’re more rigorous, but when you look at the methods, it’s clear it’s an overstatement that’s not in line with the standards of the profession,” Amrein-Beardsley said.
A more accurate predictive study, she said, would require a large sample of students from different educational, racial and socioeconomic backgrounds that tracks them throughout college.
To be sure, few students are earning admission to Florida’s universities based on a CLT score.
USA TODAY requested the number of CLT applications the universities received from 2023 to 2025 and compared those numbers to the universities’ self-reported application numbers for the fall 2024 and 2025 semesters.
Less than 1 percent of students applying to the University of Florida or Florida State University for the fall 2024 and 2025 semesters used a CLT score, records showed. Both schools are among the most selective public institutions in the state, but the story was similar for the other state universities.
Few students and families are aware of the CLT, said Liz Pozo, the chief operating officer of Leading & Learning, a Florida-based college consulting company. Even if they do know of the test, she said, they may want to apply to other schools that don’t accept the CLT, including the Ivy League and other selective schools. Only about 350 colleges accept the CLT, many of them private, Christian schools, while almost all universities that use tests in admissions accept the ACT and SAT.
Families, she said, do not call her for help with the CLT.
It makes it hard to suggest students take the CLT when there’s little evidence it helps them get into college, she said.Without those numbers, she said, suggesting that students take the CLT would be like “we’re operating from a point of dishonesty.”
“We can’t see anything,” she said. “There’s nothing there.” The lack of information hasn’t deterred the Pentagon. It described the test as “nationally administered and academically rigorous,” in a statement to USA TODAY. In addition to its use in the military academies’ admissions, a CLT score can also now be used to apply for scholarships in Senior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs at public and private universities nationally.
Why is the Classic Learning Test controversial?
Tate, who taught in private and public schools, said he launched the test in 2015 after he noticed his students lacked interest in classic literature and philosophy. Teaching to the SAT or ACT, he said, meant that students weren’t experiencing the “Western canon” or “the Christian intellectual tradition.”
That “canon,” includes the likes of Plato and Aristotle; Catholic saints like Thomas Aquinas or protestant thinkers like Martin Luther; and a smattering of figures popular in English classes like Shakespeare, Chaucer and Mark Twain. The most recent author is Toni Morrison.
Classic Learning Initiatives say the test is apolitical and students need not have read the classics to take it. The exam’s board also includes many conservative luminaries, including Christopher Rufo, as well as philosopher, Cornell West. Some left-leaning critics have decried the test for focusing on the works of old, white men. Meanwhile, some conservative writers have complained the test inclusion of diverse authors veered into “woke” ground.
Classic Learning Initiatives say the test is apolitical and students need not have read the classics to take it. The exam’s board also includes many conservative luminaries, including Christopher Rufo, as well as philosopher, Cornell West.
“What we’re saying is that the kind of texts on college entrance exams are going to drive the kind of texts people focus on in the classroom,” Tate said.
That idea has made the Classic Learning Test a darling of the political right. It’s being introduced, primarily in red states, where Republican lawmakers have pressured public and private universities to conform with conservative ideals by banning concepts like DEI and introducing civics center that focus on American history and ideals, often staffed by right-leaning academics. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s Education Department has launched investigations into dozens of universities, often tied to DEI, transgender athletes or race in college admissions. The queries are often focused on elite universities, including Harvard, that traditionally have been perceived as liberal.
And the adoption of the CLT has been primarily in red states, sometimes driven by conservative legislatures. Lawmakers in Indiana have passed legislation requiring the state’s public colleges to accept the CLT for admission. Most of the public universities in Georgia and the North Carolina system have also adopted it. A bill to use the test for admissions is currently before the Ohio legislature. Tennessee voted earlier this year to allow the exam to be used for students seeking to graduate high school early. The Iowa Board of Regents, which had previously rejected the CLT citing a lack of research into the test, has since added it to the formula it uses for automatic admissions.
Most recently, Texas moved to allow the exam for use in admissions following a study that found it was “of sufficient rigor and reliability.” The same report, however, noted the exam had the least predictive ability compared to the ACT and SAT and noted it would require “additional evidence before its scores could be considered comparably defensible for statewide Texas admissions use.”
It’s proved lucarative too. In Florida alone, the state department of education and at least five school districts have signed contracts worth at least $2.8 million to administer the CLT since the test was approved for high schools in 2023, according to a review of publicly available agreements. That’s likely an undercount because Florida has 67 school districts. Arkansas, where the CLT was approved in 2025, budgeted $12 million to administer the exam in the state’s high schools over the next four years.
USA TODAY graphics journalist Carlie Procell contributed to this report. Chris Quintana is an investigative reporter at USA TODAY. He can be reached at cquintana@usatoday.com or via Signal at 202-308-9021. He is on X at @CQuintanaDC.