Unless you’re a junior in high school or the parent of one, you probably haven’t thought about the SAT in a hot minute. But according to Jeremy Wayne Tate, that’s exactly why these tests matter so much. We don’t think about standardized testing on a regular basis, so we don’t realize just how much these exams shape school curricula and, ultimately, influence the intellectual formation of entire generations.

The SAT and the ACT have recently abandoned rigorous intellectual standards. As I wrote in 2025, the SAT’s 2023 redesign gutted much of what its reading section once demanded, replacing lengthy literary passages with bite-sized questions that often test data interpretation rather than sustained reading comprehension. But not all hope is lost. There’s a new test on the block, and it demands the kind of intellectual rigor the SAT and ACT have left behind.

In 2015, Jeremy Tate founded the Classic Learning Test (CLT) to provide an alternative to the SAT and the ACT. Drawing on classic literature and philosophy rather than the contemporary texts that dominate many standardized exams, the CLT brings back the Western canon that shaped our civilization and acts as a “catalyst for renewal in education nationwide.” And the CLT is expanding its reach, with new Classical Baccalaureate courses designed to provide a classical alternative to the College Board’s AP program, as David Randall wrote in May.

I recently sat down with Jeremy to discuss the origins of the CLT, the history of standardized testing, the crisis facing higher education, and why the great books still affect us today.

1. What gaps in the current standardized testing landscape led to the creation of the CLT?

I always want to give the disclaimer: I was a very normal kid. I wanted to play football, NFL. I never was the kid who thought, ‘I want to start a standardized test.’ Who says that?

My brother-in-law is a football coach, and my kids are always like, ‘Dad, why couldn’t you be the coach like Uncle Rob? Starting a test is so lame.’

And for a lot of people, it is lame. It’s boring. We sometimes joke that for most people the only thing more boring than taking a standardized test is hearing somebody talk about a standardized test. But I think it’s precisely because it is so boring to most people that it flies under the radar and really acts as a powerful lever in the entire educational ecosystem.

One of the very few concepts that pretty much every teacher agrees on is that, for better or worse, the test really does shape and drive the curriculum. We can debate whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing—I’ve heard good arguments on both sides, actually—but it’s simply a reality.

If teachers know that on their most important test, their students are going to be encountering Aristotle and Plato and Dante and Boethius, it’s going to shape what they’re doing in the classroom in a really powerful way.

2. Tell us about the origins of the CLT.

CLT, in some ways, was founded by accident. I was running an SAT and ACT prep company when those exams aligned with the Common Core standards, which represented a big move away from fiction and the classics toward what they called at the time ‘informational texts.’ Everyone was upset because schools were rejecting Common Core, yet the only college entrance exams were Common Core-aligned. Parents kept asking, ‘Where’s our test?’

At first, I thought I had a business idea. I figured someone must be creating a new alternative to the SAT and ACT, and I’d be the first to market with an online prep course for it.

So, I stayed up all hours of the night trying to figure out who was building this new exam. I was really surprised to discover that nobody was doing it. Even when I found people talking about it, I could tell they knew even less than I did—which wasn’t much.

I realized I was in this interesting position. I was a college counselor; I knew a lot of people in college admissions, and I knew the SAT and ACT really well. Somebody was going to do this, so why don’t I try?

I started calling schools like Thomas Aquinas College and St. John’s in Annapolis and asking, ‘If there were a college entrance exam that reflected what you’re doing here, would that be valuable?’

The answer was absolutely yes.

3. Can you give us a rundown of the history of standardized testing?

There’s a little bit of history behind this.

The College Board, which owns the SAT, has been around since 1899. It was formed as colleges became increasingly popular at the turn of the twentieth century to unify admissions standards.

Before that, if you look at something like the Harvard entrance exam, which remained static throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, students were basically translating Greek and Latin. That shaped education to get to Harvard. If you wanted to attend Harvard, you needed a command of Greek and Latin.

Then, in 1926, the College Board released the SAT. It was an interesting concept. They worked with Carl Brigham, who had developed the Army Alpha test during World War I. The Army Alpha test was this idea that we’re trying to get at required knowledge—basically just cognitive horsepower. And the idea was, ‘Who are we gonna put on the front lines, and who should we keep back in intelligence in World War I?’ And you know, it’s a high-stakes test, so you wanted to do well on that, right?

So they took the idea from the Army Alpha test and put it in the SAT, and very few people heard about it until World War II.

Once the GI Bill passed and millions of veterans came home, suddenly there were way more applicants than seats at colleges and universities. Suddenly, the SAT becomes a household name. If you wanted to get into the Columbias, the NYUs, and the Harvards, you needed to do well on this one test.

Then, the ACT launched in 1959 and argued that the SAT wasn’t fair because it was measuring aptitude rather than what students actually learned in school. And for a lot of people, that seemed fair. But wait—which classroom? Public school? Catholic school? Jewish day school? Classical school? Montessori school? Homeschool? What are we talking about here?

And it became really clear over time that public school was going to be the default standard for everyone else.

So the SAT has historically been an aptitude test—think doing a puzzle—and the ACT was historically an achievement test.

When the CLT launched in 2015, we intentionally took elements from both of those things.

4. What barriers are preventing wider adoption of the CLT, and how can those challenges be addressed?

We were in front of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board … and I had to testify. Then right behind me, the ACT testified, and then right behind them the College Board testified. You could see the looks on the faces of the commissioners. They know that this is a duopoly trying to protect its duopoly. A lot of monopolies only exist because of government involvement. They don’t exist naturally in the marketplace. Competition eliminates most monopolies, but they want to be the only ones that can compete.

The next day, the commissioner sent a letter to all of the public universities in Florida, and we have a full CLT option.

The SAT and ACT are very deeply in the legislation in every state—AP as well. So there’s still a lot of policy work to do in terms of moving legislation, and we’re doing that. Oddly enough, right now all of the votes are going almost completely down party lines.

It’s funny because we’re talking about Frederick Douglass and Jane Austen and Flannery O’Connor—we’ve got Toni Morrison on there. This shouldn’t be a partisan issue. But because, heaven forbid, we also have G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, many progressives have taken alarm. They see it as a threat, and they’re voting against it almost uniformly. Unfortunately, we’re getting this red-state test right now, and I’d love for that not to be true.

But part of what’s taken root in higher education is almost a kind of new intellectualism.

5. What is driving anti-intellectualism in our society?

I think it’s a number of things. I was, like, 40 before I really got a good sense of the particular moment in history that I was occupying. That’s what education does. It allows people to become travelers—to get the 10,000-foot perspective on your own historical moment.

I started thinking about the fact that, for most of history—for something like 1,700 of the last 2,000 years—education, for Christians and not Christians, was largely created by the Catholic Church. That’s just the history of the West. They formed the University of Paris and Oxford and Cambridge and many of the first parochial schools. Not only that, but many of the great works of antiquity were preserved and passed down through European monasteries through the Middle Ages.

To me, it’s a battle of teleology at the end of the day. For millennia, education had fundamentally been about the cultivation of virtue, moral formation, and the passing down of a cultural and intellectual tradition. Those traditions looked different in different civilizations, but those two goals were largely shared.

Then something changed dramatically in the twentieth century, where the thing being passed down became almost the enemy.

Moral formation, which had been centered on virtues like generosity, kindness, humility, loving your neighbor—things that we should all agree on in the West—suddenly became controversial.

Suddenly, imparting any morality in schools became deeply suspect.

6. How did the ideological divide in the humanities happen?

That’s such a great question.

I’m not young, but I’m not that old either—but even when I was in college, the defenders of the so-called ‘useless arts’—theater, poetry, classical literature—weren’t MAGA conservatives. Those were normie leftie professors who had grown up in the 60s and 70s and had earned their PhDs during that historical moment.

I think a couple of different things became connected. One was the hard push toward what has been called ‘multiculturalism,’ which I think many people now recognize was often more anti-Western than genuinely multicultural.

If you look at AP Literature today, you get a little bit of Shakespeare, but it’s mostly ‘global perspectives.’ Even in many non-Western countries, students are still reading deeply from the Western intellectual tradition, while here in America we ourselves are neglecting it.

I also think that a lot of conservatives were asleep at the wheel for decades.

It became easy to think, ‘Education is something Democrats worry about. That’s their policy issue, and it’s fine.’

But people stopped asking the important questions: What is education for? What’s the goal of sending children to school? What are we trying to pass down?

So over time, we went from examining some goofy anti-Western ideas to something that has become a genuine national concern.

7. Why are elite universities moving away from genuine academic excellence?

It’s interesting. People have been upset about Harvard for literally 300 years. Even in 1710, people were upset that Harvard was making its departure from its Puritan foundations and toward secular humanism.

Today, the main thing they’re selling is ‘acceptance into the club’ rather than the actual education they’re providing students.

I’ll tell you this as an employer: if I get a job applicant from Hillsdale, Harvard, St. John’s, Thomas Aquinas College, the Harvard one is the one I’m the least excited about. I know the kind of formation that these other young people have had, and I’m more suspicious of what kinds of ideas they’ve ingested at an elite institution like [Harvard].

It’s been a long haul—the story of every university since the 1960s has basically been the story of completely trashing their core curriculum.

Since the 1960s, the story of many elite universities has basically been the systematic dismantling of the core curriculum.

The first article I ever wrote with Cornel West was a Washington Post op-ed around 2020 or 2021. It made it up to the ladies on The View. They start talking about how much they benefited from the core curriculum they experienced in college during the 1960s.

These days, kids are generally not going to sign up for classes in government, Western philosophy, or the great books unless an adult comes along and says, ‘You have to take this.’

That’s our job as grown-ups.

8. What does an educated 18-year-old look like?

Gosh, I think this is the very best argument for the classical education movement. The very best argument for classical education is simply meeting these young people. It’s crazy.

I’m not trying to bash public school kids, but when you meet a student coming out of the Veritas School in Richmond or Jesuit Tampa, it’s next level. These students have had a deep dive into Western intellectual tradition, and that’s a formative experience. It shapes who they are. I think you see the cultivation of virtues: eloquence, maturity.

You have a deeper sense of your own smallness in the world—in a healthy way. You also develop a deep sense of gratitude. Even though a number of things in our culture kind of suck right now, we still live in the most amazing time in history—we just don’t know it.

9. The CLT has become known for drawing from classic texts. Why are those works uniquely valuable?

My own experience is funny. I didn’t do well in school. I hated school. I graduated high school with a 2.9 GPA. I got into LSU. Then, my introduction to the classics came while I was living in a tent in Alaska in 2002.

I got a copy of Crime and Punishment with the purpose of impressing a girl. It totally worked—we’re married now.

She was always the really smart one. She went to UVA—class president, bilingual. She took a class at UVA on redemptive themes in Russian literature, and it had made a huge impact on her.

At that point, I didn’t even understand why anyone would read fiction. I would make fun of her. But then I got this book. I had this summer in Alaska with no distractions. No phone, no TV, no radio. I cleaned fish during the day, and at night I either read or twiddled my thumbs. I started reading Crime and Punishment to impress her, but I got completely hooked.

Spoiler alert: it starts off with this gruesome double murder. Then you see throughout the book the way that the main character, Raskolnikov, is disfigured and distorted. Sin wrecks his mind, his psychology, his relationships, his peace. It taught me about the human condition, what it means to be a person, and what sin does to disfigure the mind and the soul.

I think reading has a grounding impact. You’re more in touch with reality by reading fiction, which is odd.

The least practical thing that man ever did was studying the stars. But now, the entire modern economy is dependent on the fact that we studied the stars—on satellites. This arena that had no monetary value—that started with wonder—changed so much of our civilization.

The work I did was driven by trying to come to know who I was as a young man and allowed me to do what I’m doing now. We want to bring back this tradition, and we think that standardized testing is a uniquely powerful way to do that.

10. Critics argue that emphasizing the Western canon excludes other traditions. How do you respond?

Hey, it’s the best one. It’s awesome. Give kids the best stuff.

I think students are so much smarter than we give them credit for. When they’re given something hot off the press, they know nobody is going to care about it in five years. But if you pull out a copy of The Odyssey and tell them that this story has been passed down to every generation for over 2,000 years, and now we’re going to pass it down to you, that’s really powerful.

11. What makes a classic a classic?

Some people say Shakespeare survived because of publishers or distribution, but more often than not, a classic becomes a classic because there was something so profoundly human, so universal, in those works that could speak to different people in different cultures in different times; something that stood the test of time. So many people had the experience of reading something profound and true that it was passed onto the next generation.

12. How can we encourage students to challenge themselves and read great classic literature?

It’s interesting. At the University of Austin, they’ve been running Great Books summer programs. Teenagers are often drawn to rebellion. So, when the government and our culture doesn’t want you reading books, I think a lot of young people are drawn to reading books as a challenge.

13. What are the classics that everyone should read?

I’ll give you four or five that have hit really hard for me.

First, The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment.

One that was more recent for me was Plato’s Apology—and I’ve read it now five times. The Apology is Socrates on trial. If Socrates, the wisest man in Western philosophy and history, can say ‘I don’t know anything,’ then there’s so much freedom in that. Socrates was just so real. The more you read it, the more you understand how threatening that was to the ‘in-the-know expert’ class. There’s nothing experts hate more than being exposed as frauds.

Moving into the modern world, I’ll argue that The Lord of the Rings is the greatest work of fiction of the twentieth century. It is our most powerful analogy for what we all have in our pockets now. We’re consumed. We think we control it, but it works the other way—and it owns and directs us over time.

I also love Brideshead Revisited a lot. And I love Flannery O’Connor. I absolutely love what she’s doing in fiction.

You can learn more about the CLT here or by following Jeremy Tate on X.