Keri D. Ingraham is the director of Discovery Institute’s American Center for Transforming Education and a senior fellow at Independent Women.
A recent open letter signed by more than 2,000 University of California science, technology, engineering and math professors expressed concerns about something that put “UC’s mission … at risk.”
Over the past five years, they wrote, students have become increasingly unprepared for college math courses. The decline has been “so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics.”
The professors proposed a solution: The UC system should once again require students to submit SAT or ACT scores in the admissions process, a practice it abandoned in 2020.
But restoring standardized testing requirements won’t solve the problems these professors identified. While K-12 education has played a significant role in the nation’s declining education standards, the SAT and ACT’s duopoly on the entrance exam market has been a major factor too.
Competition between the SAT and ACT established perverse financial incentives to make their respective products less challenging, thanks to their status as high-stakes gateways to college admissions and scholarship dollars. If one test is seen as more likely to produce higher scores, students will gravitate to it and increase that company’s revenue.
Indeed, the tests are a major moneymaker. The ACT’s status as a private company means specific data is unavailable, but the College Board, which administers the SAT and PSAT, generates between $200 million to $300 million per year from the two tests alone. In 2024, its total revenue was a staggering $1.17 billion.
Both exams are very different today than even 10 years ago. Changes to format, structure and content have made them easier and less reflective of the knowledge and reasoning students need to succeed in college. An SAT reading passage today ranges from 25 to 150 words, down from 500 to 700 words. Test takers are also presumed to have a more limited vocabulary and can use calculators for the math section.
In 2024, the College Board said the shorter reading passages provide students with “more varied, opportunities to demonstrate what they know and can do and to encounter information, ideas, and perspectives they find interesting and relevant.” It also claimed that permitting the use of a calculator “allows the Math section to more accurately reflect how the tool of the calculator is used in schools and in the real world. It also eases test administration by eliminating separately timed test portions with different rules.”
If the tests existed in isolation, these lower standards would be concerning enough. But the SAT and ACT also drive school curriculums and instruction, compounding the problem. Improving student learning outcomes requires raising expectations and academic standards — not dumbing them down.
This problem can’t solely be blamed on the 2020-21 pandemic school closures, either. In 2024, a study from the ACT found that remedial classes were rising among new college students even in 2018 and 2019.
The race to the bottom between these two tests has allowed another competitor to emerge.
Founded in 2015, the Classic Learning Test (CLT) includes standards that its competitors abandoned years ago. The test features reading passages from authors who shaped Western thought, including Homer, Galileo Galilei, William Shakespeare, Henry David Thoreau, Frederick Douglass and G.K. Chesterton. The accompanying questions require careful analysis rather than superficial pattern recognition, which is a feature of the SAT and ACT. Students are barred from using a calculator for the math section.
The CLT’s high standards have helped it find a place in the testing market dominated by the SAT and ACT. More than 350 colleges and universities nationwide now accept it, including private colleges, the U.S. military academies and state university systems in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana and North Carolina. More states, including Iowa, Ohio and Texas, are considering legislation that would expand the list of institutions that accept the test.
Critics argue that rigorous assessments are poor measures of student ability. But lowering standards did not level the playing field. Instead, students were given an illusion of readiness. It’s about time some healthy competition was introduced into the college entrance exam market.
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