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Freshmen and seniors at about 200 colleges across the U.S. take a little-known test every year to measure how much better they get at learning to think. The results are discouraging.

At more than half of schools, at least a third of seniors were unable to make a cohesive argument, assess the quality of evidence in a document or interpret data in a table, The Wall Street Journal found after reviewing the latest results from dozens of public colleges and universities that gave the exam between 2013 and 2016. (See full results.)

At some of the most prestigious flagship universities, test results indicate the average graduate shows little or no improvement in critical thinking over four years.

Search how 68 public colleges and universities performed on the CLA+ standardized test.

Some of the biggest gains occur at smaller colleges where students are less accomplished at arrival but soak up a rigorous, interdisciplinary curriculum.

The so-called Ivy League schools are now more about becoming a credentialed member of the elite and not about teaching students to learn. A lot of the so-called best colleges actually aren’t. It’s no surprise these test results aren’t disclosed to the public, since they seem likely to be a fair assessment of a college’s ability to actual teach students; applications to the Ivy League might well dry up if parents came to understand their child would be better-equipped with life skills elsewhere.

In spite of the obvious alarms raised by this test, expect colleges to breezily ignore them until it is too late, similar to how the media has refused to change and is now being tuned out by Americans in the post-2016 world.

Flagship institutions such as the University of Kentucky and the University of Texas at Austin attract some of the brightest students in the country. Their students showed little improvement in CLA+ performance. Their value-added score put their ranking in the bottom third of all schools that gave the test in the same year.

Kentucky and UT Austin officials criticized the test and said they no longer use it.