“I decided to take the National Latin Exam because it gave me a good understanding of how I was doing [in Latin]...compared to the rest of the nation,” says TPSer Elisabeth Doornink, who was one of the many TPS students to participate in the National Latin Exam this March.

 

The NLE is a comprehensive exam taken yearly by over 149,000 Latin students from schools around the world. The exam, which is offered at seven different levels of difficulty, contains multiple choice questions in categories including grammar, comprehension, and derivatives, as well as Roman life, mythology and history.

 

TPS’s Latin instructor, Dave Spotts, has given his students the option of participating in the NLE since 2003, and his students always perform well. This year the students taking the NLE through TPS received four summa cum laude awards, six maxima cum laude awards, 17 magna cum laude awards, and four Cum Laude awards.

 

“This is my first year taking Latin with TPS, but I did try to take Latin before with a computer program,” says Latin student Tiffany Yonts. “It was okay, but I forgot almost everything that it taught me about Latin grammar. Mr. Spotts is a great teacher, though, and I've learned a lot from him this year.”

 

Laura McMillion, another of Mr. Spotts’ students, says, “I decided to take Latin because it's the basis for so many other languages. I like studying Latin because it makes the romance languages, like Spanish, much easier to pick up.”

 

“I decided to take the National Latin Exam because I love tests and figured that I wouldn't lose anything by taking it,” says Tiffany.  “I almost missed the chance to take it, though, because I'm a die-hard procrastinator and didn't get everything taken care of as soon as I should have.”

 

Other students opted to take the test for record keeping purposes. TPS student Oliver Kent says, “In [Pennsylvania] you have to show a portfolio of a sample of your year’s work to an evaluator. My mom thought it would be good to have [the NLE] in there.”

 

Elisabeth says that “[The NLE] was harder than I had expected. Latin I was fairly easy, but Latin II was harder. My knowledge (or lack thereof) of Roman mythology hindered me, as did the vocabulary.”

 

Oliver adds, “The history was my real problem, and it is why I got cum laude.”

 

“It was definitely harder than I expected,” says Tiffany. “Being the avid test-taker that I am, I tend to get slightly cocky when it comes to tests. But, since I haven't even finished Latin I yet, taking the Latin I test was much harder than I expected it to be. I thought that I would have an easy time, but I had to work very, VERY hard at it. I'm glad that I took it seriously, though, because it showed me that, just because I'm a good test-taker, it doesn't mean that I have everything in my back pocket.”

 

But all the hard work seems to have paid off. “I...scored summa cum laude, which was an improvement over my score from last year,” says Laura with a smile.

 

For more information about the National Latin Exam, visit the official webpage at www.nle.org.