High School Student Gets Perfect Score On National Latin Exam

By Jeff White

Michael Taylor is liable to take issue with those who say that Latin is a dead language. The Newtown High School freshman, who chose this vintage vernacular as his foreign language concentration, recently turned in a perfect score on the National Latin Exam.

“I was pretty surprised,” Michael commented Tuesday afternoon. He said that although he had no idea he would score as well as he did, when the 45-minute exam was over, he felt confident that he didn’t make too many mistakes.

The news reached him via his Latin teacher, Jennifer Huettner, who made the announcement in his Latin I class. In all aspects of the class, Ms Huettner said, Michael’s work is a notch above all others.

Although the name of the test implies differently, the National Latin Exam is actually taken by more than 120,000 students worldwide each year. It takes on five broad areas of the Latin curriculum: comprehension, mythology, daily life in Rome and Rome’s history, grammar, and vocabulary.

For exceptional performance, students can achieve a summa cum laude gold medal, a maxima cum laude silver medal, or a magna cum laude or cum laude distinction. Those few students who achieve perfect scores receive com honore maximo egregio certificates.

Michael said he chose Latin as a language of study because he hoped it would help him with, among other things, his mastery of English, since many English words and grammatical rules derive from Latin.

He also chose to study French, though he says he will drop French to concentrate more on Latin because “I enjoyed Latin more.”

Fifty Latin students from every level at the high school took the National Latin Exam this year, though Michael was the only one who scored perfectly. Although there was only one flawless score, over half of the high school students who took the exam were recognized as national winners.

Gold medal winners were: Renee Whippie, Nicole Lachapelle, Matthew Sullivan, and Andrew Portnoy.

Silver medal winners were: Kyle Nowak, Mark Huot, Jennifer Murphy, Bryan Kotwicki, Casey Kirch, Caitlyn Elf, Naomi Kim, Emmeline Brancato, Amy Barackman, and Shelley Solheim.

Magna cum laude distinction was handed to: Andrew Beck, Christoph Larocque, John Barry, and Kate Yackel.

Cum laude distinction was handed to: Rebecca Preston, Andrew Rouse, Jennifer Dorenbosch, Jesse Weber, Amanda Cruz, Lance Panigutti, and Lauren Parrish.