With the U.S. Department of Education under sustained political pressure, several states have started recalibrating what it means for a high schooler to be "ready." Graduation requirements are loosening in some places. And a growing body of reporting suggests that at least one of the tools driving those numbers — the Classic Learning Test — may be doing less to raise students up than to lower the bar they have to clear.
Florida, North Carolina, Indiana, Arkansas, and Oklahoma now accept the CLT for college admissions outright. Louisiana and Wyoming have taken a smaller step — recognizing CLT scores for state merit scholarships, though not yet for admission to their public universities. Florida currently sits at No. 2 in U.S. News's higher education rankings, and Wyoming has cracked the top 10. So this isn't a story about weak states settling for an easier test. It's a story about strong ones choosing to.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called the Classic Learning Test the "gold standard" of standardized exams. A USA Today review of the test, conducted with a panel of mathematics education experts, complicates that praise: reviewers found its quantitative section leans heavily on pre-algebra and middle-school-level math, a level well below what many incoming college freshmen are expected to place into.
Jeremy Tate, the CLT's founder and CEO, disputes the idea that this makes the test easier. He points out that Florida's Department of Education — not Classic Learning Initiatives — sets the score required to pass, and that state officials say they calibrated it to match ACT and SAT equivalency. It's worth noting Florida is also raising that required score starting next year, which reads less like a rebuttal and more like an acknowledgment that the bar had room to rise.
Who is the CLT actually for?
Whatever the intent, on the ground the CLT has increasingly become the exam of choice for students struggling to clear the SAT or ACT bar. Like those tests, it covers literature, grammar, philosophy, and history. But its math section tells a different story — one the CLT's own manual seems to anticipate: "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. 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."
Anna DeJarnette, a mathematics education professor at the University of Cincinnati who took part in the USA Today review, put it more plainly: "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."
What does this mean for students?
The numbers, courtesy of EdTrust, are striking. Since Florida approved the CLT in 2023, the state's graduation rate has climbed from 88% to 92% as of 2025. Duval County Public Schools saw its graduation rate rise seven percentage points — nearly double the statewide gain — and Hillsborough County's rate reached a record 91%, with one in six students there graduating by way of the CLT in 2025.
None of that proves the CLT alone drove the increase; districts don't run controlled experiments, and other factors could be at play. But the timing lines up closely enough, across enough districts, that superintendents themselves are the ones drawing the connection — and touting it.
That connection carries weight because an estimated 72% of jobs are projected to require education or training beyond high school by 2031. If a growing share of diplomas are being earned by clearing a math bar set at the middle-school level, it's worth asking whether those diplomas are preparing students for what comes next, or just for the ceremony.
Christopher Bernier, superintendent of Duval County Public Schools in Jacksonville, isn't apologizing for it. "We're hopeful that CLT will remain," he told his school board, "because it has been a game changer for some of our kids, who can't seem to manufacture the ACT or SAT score."
It's a fair point, as far as it goes. But it also leaves the harder question sitting right there, unanswered: a game changer toward what, exactly?
