The company, however, describes the CLT as part of “the larger educational freedom movement of our time” — language that echoes that of conservative supporters of private-school vouchers and tax credits for home-schoolers.

After a century of dominance by the College Board and the nonprofit ACT — which administers the test of the same name — the emergence of an alternative is “healthy and overdue,” said Frederick Hess, director of education policy at the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank.

The CLT’s “author bank” — the range of writing that could be on an exam — includes the Mesopotamian poem “The Epic of Gilgamesh,” as well as Toni Morrison, Mary Wollstonecraft, Charles Darwin, Frederick Douglass, Ida B.

Mr. Tate, a former history teacher who founded the Classic Learning Test in 2015, said his company had made an effort to diversify the material by including more passages from African and South American writers.

Stetson University, a private college in DeLand, Fla., said it would begin accepting CLT scores this year, but a spokesman said the school had not yet received requests from prospective students to submit them.

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