In Wisconsin, a Republican-led bill seeks to reinstate standardized ACT testing requirements for admission to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

[Excerpts]

Republican lawmakers are advancing a bill to restore the ACT requirement as the "predominant" factor in admission to the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Rep. Dave Murphy, R-Hortonville, told The Daily Cardinal he co-authored the bill because he wants to see “more objective criteria” in admissions decisions.

The University of Wisconsin System has been test-optional since the COVID-19 pandemic. The test-optional policy expires after the 2026-27 school year, but Murphy said the University of Wisconsin System could “very well reinstate it” after extending it three times since 2020.

“They’ve done that a number of times, so I have no idea that they’re going to end that policy,” Murphy said. “The bill is about making it happen for sure.”

The bill wouldn’t affect those applying through the guaranteed admission program, which secures admission to UW-Madison for applicants in the top 5% of their high school class.

Democratic lawmakers on the Committee on Colleges and Universities said they were concerned for students who may need to retake the ACT and could not easily access a testing center at a Feb. 5 public hearing. This particularly affects rural students, whose testing centers may be hours away if they are in northern or western Wisconsin.

Rep. Alex Joers, D-Waunakee, told the Cardinal he worries this bill might deter high school students from applying to college at all if standardized test scores become the largest factor in admissions decisions. He added that many students also cannot afford to retake the ACT or hire a tutor, something he experienced first-hand.

“I was in that situation,” Joers said. “I didn't have a whole lot of extra funds to be able to put forward... and fortunately, this bill wasn’t law.”

Matt note: The Republicans control both the state assembly and senate, but the Governor is a Democrat.

 
A state senator in Delaware is taking an opposite tack to the Wisconsin legislators by suggesting that Delaware re-consider the current administration of the SAT to all juniors in the state, as well as reliance on the exam as a high school curriculum mastery assessment.

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Is too much weight being placed on the SAT, when a Delaware student looks to advance after graduation?

State Senator Eric Buckson, R-Dover, who was a teacher and coach at Polytech for 30 years, is calling for more discussion and a reassessment of the SAT as the primary indicator of a student's performance and proficiency.

Every 11th-grade student in Delaware is required to take the test. The state covers the cost, which is roughly $51 per student. Last year, nearly 9,500 Delaware students took the SAT.

However, many of them do not intend to go on to higher education.

Commenting Thursday during a Joint Finance Committee hearing, Buckson said "I'm not opposed to the SAT. I'm opposed to it being the blanket textbook decision-maker."

“The SAT has value for students who plan to attend college, but it was never designed to measure mastery of state standards or the effectiveness of classroom instruction,” Buckson said in a statement. “When it becomes the main yardstick for success, it tells an incomplete story.”

Buckson said he has been involved in ongoing discussions with education leaders, policy makers and stakeholders about how to use other ways to measure success, which are allowed under federal law: industry credentials, dual enrollment, and work-based learning.

“The SAT is not a bad test,” Buckson said. “It’s simply not the right tool to define success for every student and every school. Delaware can do better.”

 
A California State University economics professor opines in the Orange County Register: "Bring back the SAT at CSU — or admit we are failing our own students."

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Every semester, instructors in the California State University system confront a discouraging and uncomfortable reality: some entering students arrive unable to perform elementary algebra or write a coherent paragraph.

In one of my courses — a General Education class that fulfills a quantitative reasoning requirement — I routinely see freshmen and sophomores struggle to calculate a basic percentage change between two whole numbers. These are not advanced mathematical skills; they are competencies most people associate with middle school math. Yet many CSU students cannot perform them reliably, nor can they clearly explain their reasoning in writing.

The result is predictable. Students become discouraged, fail courses, drop classes, or take longer to complete their degrees than expected.

Part of the reason lies in a policy decision made across the CSU system: campuses such as CSU Long Beach no longer require the SAT or ACT for first-year admission. While the test waiver began as a reasonable pandemic-era response, it has never been reinstated. In effect, CSU removed a diagnostic tool that once helped identify students who were not yet ready for college-level work.

This matters because CSU is one of the best bargains in American higher education. For a fraction of the cost of private colleges — and often far less than out-of-state public universities — CSU offers students a genuine opportunity to build skills, and increase lifetime earnings without crushing debt. But affordability only counts if students succeed and graduate. When underprepared students fail or require extra years to graduate, the bargain erodes quickly — in lost time, lost wages, and rising frustration. It is demoralizing for the students and their professors.

A standardized exam like the SAT or ACT is not a perfect measure of ability, but it provides a consistent snapshot of reading, writing, and quantitative reasoning skills across thousands of high schools. Used properly, it functions as an early warning system. A low score does not mean someone lacks potential; it signals that the student may benefit from additional preparation before entering a four-year program.

California already has an effective solution for this: the community college system. Redirecting underprepared students to community colleges is not exclusion — it is smart sequencing. California’s community college–to–CSU transfer pipeline is one of the strongest in the nation. It allows students to build foundational skills at lower cost, gain confidence, and enter CSU academically prepared. A diagnostic exam helps guide students into this pathway earlier, before they accumulate debt and discouragement.

Without any meaningful diagnostic, students are told by adults they trust that they are “college-ready” without knowing whether that is true. College faculty are then forced to spend instructional time reteaching basic math and writing, which detracts from the advanced material a college course is meant to deliver. Curricula become diluted, instructors grow frustrated, and students feel embarrassed struggling with material they believe they should already know.

The CSU system holds a public trust: to offer access to a four-year degree that employers, graduate schools, and society can rely upon. By abandoning standardized diagnostics without a viable replacement, CSU violates that trust. Reinstating the SAT or ACT — or another rigorous, systemwide assessment — does not lock students out of higher education. It gives them honest information, clearer pathways, and a better chance to succeed.

 
Taking the opposite view, a professor and author responds to recent news regarding rising numbers of unprepared math student at UCSD, and makes her case that "UCSD Can Live Without the SAT."

[Excerpts

The argument that the UC system is setting students up to fail might be more compelling if it were true. However, analysis of data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System indicates that first-to-second year retention at UCSD stayed consistent after the adoption of test-free admissions in 2020. In 2018, when the UC system still required tests, the retention rate was at 94 percent. Ditto for 2023 and 2024. These numbers are notably stable.

Retention is just one data point, and math remediation is another. As noted in the UCSD math report, the number of students needing developmental math rose from less than 1 percent of the first-year class in 2020 to 11.8 percent in 2025. Current UCSD students experienced online learning during a crucial time in their math development. There are other reasons why students fall behind in math. Math proficiency is cumulative, so gaps in skill development can have negative repercussions down the line. Wealthier parents will schlep their kids to Kumon to address the holes. Guess who gets left behind?

More UCSD students need support in math, so it’s a good thing they’re attending one of the nation’s best-resourced institutions. Indeed, UCSD’s math department mapped out a plan of attack on how they can target students for earlier intervention and support.

Spurred by the report, U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy announced plans to investigate math instruction at selective institutions. He needs to understand that UCSD is a bad test case for a national referendum on standardized tests or even math placement, given the complex dynamics affecting math instruction at the institution.

Yes, there are many challenges with K-12 math preparation. Accordingly, university departments need to rework their practices to support students, and they should receive the necessary resources. Still, it’s hard to see what returning to required standardized testing would bring. If the goal is to exclude students who still have a very high chance of graduating, then perhaps it’s the right approach. However, if the goal is to advance both excellence and social mobility, the test-free experiment at the UCs actually seems to be going pretty well. Maybe not if you own a test prep company, but that’s another story.

 
A number of articles excerpted below involve increasing acceptance for the Classic Learning Test. To get a detailed view of the CLT, see Akil Bello's recent piece on his impressions after he took the exam himself.

[Excerpts]

For students trying to figure out if this test will give them an advantage getting into college, the short answer is “probably not” (unless they're down to be dishonest, which CLT makes a little too easy). I’ll delve more deeply into reasons later but here are some quick hitters:

Is it a different test from the SAT and ACT: Sure, sort of. The CLT is the generic grocery store cola where SAT is Coca-Cola and ACT is Pepsi. It’s mostly the same, most of us will see some differences but we'd likely see more similarities. Scientists could identify lots of differences that wouldn't matter to most drinkers. Brown bubbly sugar drinks are basically brown bubbly sugar drinks no matter what molecules are used to formulate it.

Is it a better test: No. Not if you define better as has fewer weird questions and quirky things likely to make a test taker get something wrong. Not if you define better as more likely to indicate and clearly define a test taker’s knowledge and abilities. Not if you define better as more transparent and clear about what is tested and how. Not if you define better as more trustworthy.

Is it more likely to get me into college: Probably not. There is less prep material, less information available, and fewer practice tests available for the CLT. Far fewer colleges accept it. Very few scholarship programs accept it. There is almost no application or scholarship program or process in which taking the CLT will let you avoid also taking and SAT or ACT, while if you took the SAT or ACT you could entirely avoid the CLT. The only advantage is its easier to cheat if you take it at home.

Reading

The passages aren’t better than what’s on the SAT or ACT, but they are definitely older and more confusing to follow out of context. I’d say that SAT and ACT passages have an intentionality that has been applied to edit them so that they make sense outside of their greater context and give a more accurate picture of a broader range of students coming from a broader range of schools. The CLT doesn’t seem to care about that. It feels like they just grabbed a random section of old text the founder liked and then wrote random questions about that text because they want everyone to read Cicero.

Math

All the math topics that appeared on the test are standard fare for SAT and ACT math sections: raising a power to a power, dividing numbers with exponents, basic algebra that was easily solved by plugging in, number properties and definitions (the result of adding positive odd to positive odd integer), word problems, line equations, triangles, circles, arithmetic sequences, etc.

All topics appeared on the ACT currently, the SAT currently or the previous version of the SAT, except for formal logic. What makes it different is the weirdness. A geometry question in which a triangle was put inside a circle and the circle was irrelevant to solving the question (but distracting as I was checking to see why the circle was included). The SAT and ACT almost never put irrelevant information in questions, and have never in my memory put on shape inside another and not required the tester to use the rules of both shapes in some way.

Security (lack of)

Here’s the main takeaway from my experience: The CLT is a cheating scandal waiting to happen.

When you take the CLT at home, no one proctors the test. No one. Not AI. Not some guy behind a bank of video screens. No one. The “security” they use is recording you with your own camera and then maybe later watching the videos of you taking the test. It’s not clear who is watching those videos or where they are being watched (China? Arkansas?).

Based on what happened with my desk set-up, we know that test takers can violate the testing rules of the CLT without their score getting canceled. I don’t know if that’s because they didn’t review my testing video or they just didn’t care that I wasn’t following the rules. Either way, it raises questions about what else people can get away with. I’ve taken a lot of standardized tests, and they’ve all had cheating issues. Not one of them made it nearly as easy to cheat as the CLT.

Individual cheating is just the start of the problems. Even if the CLT catches someone cheating on the test a week or more afterwards, it will be too late to stop cheating on a much bigger scale. There is nothing to stop someone from sitting down for the CLT at 7 a.m. and writing down their answers to every question. And there is nothing to stop that person from selling those answers to people who want to get a Bright Futures scholarship in Florida or a merit aid from one of the couple hundred colleges that take the CLT. Or, starting next year, to people who want to go to West Point thanks to the Secretary of War. Do these colleges know how easy it is to cheat on this test? Is that what the Navy wants, people who paid for a test score? Because if the Asian Mafia cheating ring or the Varsity Blues scandal taught us anything, it’s that if people can cheat to get into college, they will. There’s no safe way to let people take tests at home without live proctors watching them.

So what’s the final verdict on the CLT? The CLT is a weird ideological love child of the 2014 SAT and the 2023 ACT. It feels like what you’d get when a home-schooled religious fundamentalist who read too much and understood too little decides to copy the SAT and ACT. It’s inconsistent, odd, and pseudo-scientific but it has just enough of a patina of science to let politicians who share their ideology justify its use.

 
The Classic Learning Test has been gaining acceptance in the last several years. Now the University of North Carolina system has announced that the CLT will be accepted in lieu of SAT/ACT.

[Excerpts]

The University of North Carolina System is now accepting a new standardized test that’s been endorsed by high-profile conservative politicians. But the test’s proponents say it’s not political.

The UNC System requires college entrance exam scores only from applicants with high school GPAs below 2.8, but students with higher GPA’s can still submit scores if they choose to. The Classic Learning Test – or CLT – is now accepted by UNC System schools in addition to the ACT and SAT. The exam places an emphasis on a traditional liberal arts education and features classical and ancient texts from the Western canon.

“We recognize that many students who are not required to submit a test score will choose to do so anyway, and the CLT gives applicants another option to help demonstrate their college readiness,” Andy Wallace, director of media relations for the UNC System, told The Charlotte Observer.

It’s the latest in a growing number of universities and university systems, such as public universities in Florida, Arkansas and Oklahoma, to bring the CLT into the fold of standardized tests they accept for admissions. Over 300 institutions now accept it. It’s been lauded by prominent Republican politicians such as Florida .

Governor Ron DeSantis and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as well as directors of education policy at conservative, Washington, D.C. think tank The Heritage Foundation. Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation, is listed as a member of the CLT’s board of academic advisors.

Despite support from leaders on the right, proponents say the test’s mission isn’t a political one. “We don’t have control over who decides to like the exam... By nature of having classic texts, it transcends partisan politics,” CLT Director of Legislative Strategy Michael Torres told The Observer. “We have people of all different backgrounds on our board of advisors – academics, people left of center, people right of center, so we don’t have an institutional stand in politics.”

The test’s creator, Jeremy Tate, is a former high school English teacher. Tate first conceived of the test around 2014 when he said the ACT and SAT aligned themselves to Obama-era Common Core standards. Common Core has been widely criticized as a top-down educational model that encourages educators to teach to the test.

Colin Dingler, chief research and policy analyst for the ACT, denies the ACT was realigned to match Common Core standards. Instead, he says the test is created by regularly surveying teachers around the country about class content. Torres said the main content differences between the CLT and tests like the SAT and ACT are that the CLT “is rooted in a liberal arts tradition” and features longer passages from classic texts.

Dingler said he doesn’t have a problem with a standardized test featuring classical texts or with students learning from them. But, he does take issue with the notion that only those texts promote critical thinking. “The claim that it’s important for kids to learn these classic texts – I think that’s a great idea and I have no problem with that,” he said. “It’s true that there are a lot of classical texts that have very rich content and do require and encourage critical thinking, but it is not true that anything that isn’t from the classical tradition doesn’t include those things.”

 
A bill in the Indiana legislature to require public colleges in the state to accept the CLT has moving closer to final passage.

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A new education bill passed in the Indiana Senate would require public schools to incorporate messages about marriage, work, and finishing school into instruction, while also requiring Indiana’s public colleges and universities to treat the Classic Learning Test the same as the SAT or ACT for admissions criteria.

Senate Bill 88, authored by Gary Byrne, passed 39-9 on Jan. 29 and is scheduled for a hearing in the Indiana House Education Committee on Feb. 18, according to LegiScan. [Matt note: it passed 7-3.]

S.B. 88’s summary describes three core changes: first, expanding K-12 instruction on “good citizenship;” second, adding the CLT to Indiana’s recognized higher education entrance exams; and last, requiring state educational institutions to accept CLT scores “to the same extent” they accept the ACT or SAT for admission criteria, effective July 1, 2026.

...the bill also places the CLT into other state-law references. For example, the bill updates statutory language about student graduation plans to include the CLT alongside the SAT and ACT as an assessment a student may plan to take voluntarily.

It also updates language connected to Indiana’s statewide assessment structure to reference a “nationally recognized college entrance exam such as the ACT, SAT, or Classic Learning Test.”

S.B. 88 adds a new section, stating that, for admission criteria, “a state educational institution shall accept the Classic Learning Test examination to the same extent as it accepts the ACT or SAT.”

 
This article from NPR contains considerable detail about the CLT vs. The SAT and ACT, as well as arguments for and against the CLT.

 
The Classic Learning Test is also coming closer to a big win in Texas.

[Excerpts]

Texas schools may soon use a new standardized test “rooted in tradition” and ethics to measure student performance. The Texas State Board of Education voted 9-4 last week to add the conservative-championed Classic Learning Test to an approved assessment list alongside a handful of others including the SAT and ACT.

Currently, students can receive an “acknowledgement” on their transcript for high scores on the College Board’s Advanced Placement tests and SAT, as well as the International Baccalaureate exams and ACT. The SBOE’s decision last week adds the CLT to that list, pending a final vote from the board in April.

The test is currently accepted by more than 350 colleges and universities, including 22 higher education institutions in Texas. One of those schools is Austin’s newest private university, the University of Austin, where Jeremy Tate, CEO and founder of the CLT test, serves on the board.

Tate has been openly critical of the College Board, which oversees the SAT and AP exams. He has accused the College Board for decentering Christian and classical education and for becoming too lax and too modern. Similar critiques inspired the founding of UATX, which advocates for a return to education grounded in the classics and denounces diversity, equity and inclusion, affirmative action and cancel culture.

But critics have taken issue with both UATX and CLT for having a conservative ideological bent — a claim that founders of both deny.

Texas SBOE member Gustavo Reveles, D-El Paso, voted against adding CLT to the approved list because of concerns about potential “cultural bias” and vetting procedures.

In a written response to questions, Tate said the exam is held to the same “industry leading psychometric methods” that other testing companies use, and that the exam is not partisan.

The CLT does not publish public reports of student results, but sends "detailed analytics and data reports" to partner schools, colleges and departments of education, said Soren Schwab, vice president of partnerships for CLT, in an email Tuesday. Meanwhile, SAT and ACT publicly share annual reports on student performance.

 
Lastly regarding the CLT, the Ohio house has passed a bill to allow high school juniors to take (at state expense) not only the CLT, but "“any other valid, reliable, nationally norm-referenced examination used for college admission.”

 
As reported by Inside Higher Ed, the College Board will shortly ban the wearing of smart glasses during SAT exams.

[Excerpts]

The College Board will prohibit students from wearing smart glasses—wearable, internet-connected computers that allow users to see a computer display in the lenses—while taking the SAT, starting in March 2026.

The organization has long banned any wearable electronics, such as Apple AirPods and Apple Watches, said Priscilla Rodriguez, senior vice president of college readiness assessments at the College Board. Such devices, as well as students’ phones, are taken away by the test’s proctor before the test begins; the rule outlawing smart glasses is just an extension of that existing policy.

Although the first smart glasses emerged in the early 2010s, the technology has risen to prominence in recent years, especially as companies such as Meta and Google have debuted artificial intelligence–enabled versions of the product. As they’ve become more common, professors have also raised alarm bells about whether they will be used for cheating; they fear that students will use them to scan tests and get fed the answers by AI in real time without detection.

At least one documented example exists of a student using smart glasses to cheat; a student in Tokyo was caught using his spectacles to post questions from a college entrance exam on the social media site X and received answers from other social media users.

SAT proctors are now trained to spot and take away students’ smart glasses if they spot them. Although the glasses look similar to a regular pair of spectacles, Rodriguez said most mainstream smart glasses brands have a distinctive look with thick, black rims, and when they’re in use, the camera on the front lights up.

“It’s a noticeable light, so if someone were taking a video, a photo, having someone talk to them through the glasses, etc., the light shines and that’s kind of like the dead giveaway,” she said.

Students will not be allowed to wear the devices even if they are prescription glasses, she noted. If students are unable to take the test without their smart glasses, they will be asked to return on a different day to take the test with a regular pair of glasses.