One of the great challenges for a Classical Christian school has always been navigating the world of college admissions. What we do in the classroom sounds foreign to admission officers who have reviewed thousands of applications from the Industrial-Model Public School which is prevalent today. Translating what we do at a school like Trinitas has long been something of a Herculean task, but we have made it work.
When the Classic Learning Test was announced a few years ago, many schools began to hope that help had finally arrived. Our own Trinitas students have been taking the CLT since 2018, and we have moved to adopt subsequent CLT exams in grades 3-10 to fulfill our standardized test obligations that the FLDOE requires. Specifically, the CLT is a test for juniors and seniors which parallels the SAT and ACT, used for colleges to assess a student’s potential for success as an undergraduate.
In the intervening years since the CLT’s inception, Classical schools have had to address concerns that this upstart test has not been around long enough to be properly vetted as a replacement for the College Board approved exams. Fortunately, Dr. Gary Welton, the assistant dean for Institutional Assessment at Grove City College, decided to take up that concern. His full study describes his methodology and measurements, and the report is worth your time. But equally helpful is the brief write up that Grove City College published, focusing on some of the interpretive elements from Dr. Welton’s work:
Welton’s study indicated that a student’s score on the CLT’s verbal section was the strongest individual predictor of first year success. Strong verbal scores also had a significant relationship with a student’s persistence, which “suggests that the skills measured by the CLT may also be related to the non-cognitive factors that contribute to student retention. Students who enter with stronger verbal reasoning skills, as measured by the CLT, are more likely to successfully navigate their first year and continue their studies,” according to Welton.
Welton compared his data on first year GPAs of Grove City College students who took the CLT with results of a 2024 College Board study of students who took the SAT and found a predictive correlation elevation of 5 basis points in favor of in favor of the CLT students. That, he says, suggests CLT is a “more precise instrument for forecasting student success.”
As of 2025, over 300 colleges and universities accept the CLT as equal with the College Board’s exams for admittance into undergraduate school. Add to that growing number that states such as Florida and Arkansas have passed legislation to accept the CLT at all state-funded colleges and universities, there can be little doubt that the CLT has momentum to become widely accepted. This is why studies to assess the CLT’s efficacy are important.
While Trinitas does not focus on test scores, we understand how something like the CLT affects students and their college aspirations. When we committed to supporting the CLT by adopting it, we hoped that time would demonstrate it to be the accurate apparatus that it appeared to be. It is wonderful to see colleges and universities, like Grove City College, taking the test seriously by assessing it through robust measurements. And hopefully more schools with follow Dr. Welton’s lead to see how the CLT might better aid other colleges in assessing a student’s potential for collegiate success. There is still much work to do ahead, but the future looks promising!
