What is the Purpose of Standardized Testing?
The History of Assessment Series
By Emily Andrews
Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
For most modern Americans, the reason to take a standardized test is obvious: students hope to achieve a universal marker that sets them apart from the crowd for competitive college admissions and scholarships. Very few take time to think about why standardized testing is required in the first place or, even more importantly, what it is that is being standardized.
It is worth thinking hard about the purpose of standardized testing, however. It turns out that there are a lot of philosophical assumptions that stand behind what has often been portrayed as a neutral and empirically “pure” device.
The Immediate Purposes of Standardized Testing
In order to think about the purpose of standardized testing, it is first necessary to understand the difference between aptitude tests and achievement tests. An aptitude test measures the inherent capacity of a student for future learning. An achievement test measures the student’s mastery of content already learned. The difference between these two aims lays at the heart of the controversies surrounding the emergence of standardized testing in America.
When standardized testing first entered the scene in the early 20th century, although it wasn’t immediately clear what it was going to be used to accomplish, some of its benefits were obvious. A standardized, multiple choice test could be administered and scored on a far larger scale than was previously possible – especially with the invention of Optical Mark Recognition (OMR) systems in the 1930s. As the number of students seeking college education increased, standardized testing arrived as a tool that could accommodate a larger pool of applicants.
Standardized testing also, by its nature, presented the opportunity for a level playing field between schools with varying curriculums. Because the tests were not keyed to a single academic program, there was a chance to create a system where certain students of a particular background were not favored over others. (For example, if a student studied Hebrew instead of Latin, they would not be directly penalized for their different course of study.)
A Struggle to Define the Larger Purpose of Standardized Testing
In The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy, Nicholas Leman argues that, once standardized testing appeared on the scene, there were four different camps striving to use it as a tool to reshape American education. Each of these camps envisioned a slightly different purpose for standardized testing. (1)
Option #1: Make Room for Progressive Education
According to Lehman, the first of these camps was the progressive movement as embodied by John Dewey. Progressive educators hoped to foster “creativity” in the classroom by doing away with a model where students, in their opinion, were treated “as drones whose empty heads should be filled with prescribed material in a disciplined environment.” Instead, teachers would “experiment with looser, more creative teaching methods.”
One of the problems with this method, however, is that graduates of such classrooms would not have a transcript defined by the kind of course credits colleges typically expected from applicants. Therefore, the progressives pushed for colleges to accept the results of standardized entrance examinations, which would demonstrate a student’s “intellectual ability rather than rote knowledge.”
Stated Purpose: Rely on an aptitude test to loosen the standards for teaching methods and curricular content in the classroom.
Option #2: Impose Strict Standards for Graduation
The second camp was a group running a project called the “Pennsylvania Study,” the purpose of which was to impose a rigid set of standards for graduation in high schools. The study had discovered that there was great disparity between the achievement levels of high school graduates in Pennsylvania. Students were successfully acquiring the requisite number of credit hours to receive a diploma, but the content of those credit hours varied significantly.
Those backing the Pennsylvania Study objected to the idea that, because of the absence of standards, all that was required for admittance to college was one’s ability to pay tuition. By administering standardized tests they hoped to ensure that a body of “uniform knowledge” was required of college applicants so they could “ruthlessly weed out the student population on the basis of the test results.”
Stated Purpose: Deliver an achievement test to set detailed standards that would limit the number of students receiving college education.
Option #3: Identify the Intellectual Elite
The third camp trying to shape the standardized testing landscape were the devotees of the recently minted “IQ test.” Those who believed in the power of the IQ test hoped to use it to identify children with the strongest raw intellectual power and ensure they received the best education possible. Those who failed to demonstrate outstanding ability would be “consigned to a briefer, more limited education.”
The most radical adherents of the IQ test represent the dark side of standardized testing’s history. Their belief in a test’s ability to accurately measure “pure inherited brainpower” coincided with their interest in eugenics as a means to manufacture high IQ in future generations. Such blind faith in an overblown idea of the scope and nature of testing is an important reminder for today’s educators. We must keep in mind the limitations of paper testing and all the factors it cannot record.
Stated Purpose: Use an aptitude test to identify those of superior intellectual ability and place them in the way of advanced educational (and therefore career) opportunities while restricting access to higher education for the majority.
Option #4: Identify and Aid Struggling Students
Lehman suggests that all three of the preceding camps were defined by a desire to restrict rather than expand educational opportunities. He writes, “Even the liberal progressive education camp was focused much more on reforming a handful of high schools across the country, most of them private day schools for the rich whose students went on to Ivy League colleges, than on bringing the benefits of progressive education to all Americans.”
Only the fourth camp, represented by E.E. Lindquist and the Iowa Academic Meet (origin of the Iowa tests), set out to use standardized testing as a means to equip teachers with knowledge about which students needed extra attention so that more children had a pathway to higher education.
Lindquist did not, however, think tests should be used to identify top performers or set universal standards in schools. He was worried that such behavior would disadvantage students who did not possess “superior bookish ability,” but had valuable abilities nonetheless.
Concerning college entrance exams, Lindquist wrote that the need was “not for a test that would skim the cream off the top of a distribution of applicants, but rather for one that would help screen out the few who might least profit from college opportunities.”
Stated Purpose: Give students an achievement test in order to identify areas of weakness and offer individualized academic aid so that as many students as possible could enjoy the opportunities afforded by higher education.
The Purpose of CLT’s Standardized Tests
In her critique of The Big Test for The Weekly Standard, Mary Campbell Gallagher notes that Lehman’s index contains no entry for “liberal arts.” His historical interpretation (focused heavily on the issue of affirmative action) belies a systemic oversight in the way Americans think about standardized testing and educational opportunity today: unlike previous generations, there is a great desire to ensure that everyone has access to college education, but there is very little concern about what that opportunity entails.
Gallagher writes, “Certainly the admissions policies of America’s colleges have real consequences in lower education.” As CLT’s CEO and Founder, Jeremy Tate, has often said, teachers inevitably teach to the test. If academic skills are tested simply as a means to career and economic gains, apart from any foundational moral value, then it is no wonder that standards have slipped. With no greater meaning to tether its work, the education system has been set adrift.
It is for this reason that the 2026 CLT Technical Report clearly and publicly states that the CLT was created “in the context of a national movement to renew the foundations of great education.”
The purpose of the CLT is to expand access to the kind of education that truly forms whole human beings, both at lower and higher levels of education.
While providing tools for colleges to reward students who have attained high levels of achievement, our greater goal is to encourage a trickle-down effect by which all students may receive guidance and assistance along a meaningful road of education that has been trod for millenia before our time. Although we believe career and economic gains can be a side effect of such education, it is not the primary end.
To that end, CLT’s suite of assessments utilize both aptitude and achievement testing mechanisms to measure performance. According to the Technical Report, “The purpose of the CLT exam is to focus on foundational intellectual skills such as clear reasoning and critical thinking, while tapping into the deep intellectual tradition of the classics. This approach to testing is aimed to measure not just students’ academic achievements, but also their aptitude—to allow students to demonstrate their intellectual capabilities, regardless of their prior academic training.”
The test’s design aligns with the aim of the liberal arts paradigm for education as it was articulated by Clark and Jain in The Liberal Arts Tradition: the language and mathematical arts “train the student not just in what to think but in how to think.”
The first advocates for standardized testing understood that it was a powerful tool for changing the landscape of American education. Now that it is entrenched in our current educational system, CLT’s goal is to reclaim this powerful tool for an ancient purpose: to promote human flourishing.
(1). See Nicholas Leman, The Big Test: The Secret History of the American Meritocracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), 20-25.
Read More from the History of Assessment Series
Emily Andrews is the Marketing Content Manager for CLT. She lives with her husband and daughter in Spokane, WA and enjoys hoarding books, eating good meals, and failing to complete crossword puzzles.
If you enjoyed this piece, be sure to check out The Anchored Podcast. For more Journal content, check out this post on whether tests are classical. From all of us at the Journal, thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week.
Published on 6th November 2026.