<p>If one gets a perfect score on the National Latin Exam, will top-tier colleges be impressed? How do they weight awards of such caliber?</p>
<p>Bump</p>
<p>A perfect paper certainly won’t hurt you. They’re not too common.</p>
<p>Bump </p>
<p>Is there some special award for that? My younger son who was a dunce at Latin always did quite well on the Latin exams, I think because there were also questions about mythology and history, so I never had much respect for them, but I think admissions committees think Latin is hard and will be at least moderately impressed.</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s any special award for it. I got a perfect score on the first level in 6th grade and my school just told me that, never heard it officially or anything from anywhere else.</p>
<p>The National Latin Exam is pretty well recognized and fairly prestigious, as these things go. As one works his/her way up through the tests, so does the prestige that comes with a good result. Getting gold, or even perfect on Latin I or II is nice, but not quite a major achievement. Well over 100,000 students take the exams each year, and thousands get gold medals at the lower levels, and hundreds get perfect papers at the lower levels. </p>
<p>But those numbers drop off as one moves up through the tests. In 2013, only 346 students worldwide made it to the Latin VI exam, only 24 got gold, and only one student scored a perfect paper.</p>
<p>For a student who sticks with Latin throughout his high school career, takes the tests at increasing levels of difficulty, and earns gold medals or perfect papers, it’s a good addition to his/her college application. It will show perseverance in a particular activity over time, increasing levels of achievement, and should a student make it to the higher levels, an achievement that is fairly rare.</p>
<p>To give some idea of just how many folks earn medals, and at which levels, here is a link to the 2013 results:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.nle.org/pdf/reports/NLEReport2013.pdf”>http://www.nle.org/pdf/reports/NLEReport2013.pdf</a></p>
<p>@notjoe: Just to clarify, Latin V and Latin VI+ are combined into the Latin V-VI exam. Therefore, a total of eight students received a perfect paper on that exam. Similarly, Latin III Prose/Latin IV Prose is combined into Latin III-IV Prose, and Latin III Poetry/Latin IV Poetry is combined into Latin III-IV Poetry.</p>
<p>From what I’ve heard, these exams do have some impact in college admissions, but they are not necessarily good predictors of Latin ability. For the first time, I received a perfect paper on the NLE this year (Latin V-VI), but I got a 2 on the AP Latin exam. Before that, I received a few gold medals on the NLE, but I felt like the AP Latin exam was 10x harder than the NLE V-VI test. :/</p>
<p>@DiscipulusBonus.</p>
<p>“For the first time, I received a perfect paper on the NLE this year (Latin V-VI), but I got a 2 on the AP Latin exam. Before that, I received a few gold medals on the NLE, but I felt like the AP Latin exam was 10x harder than the NLE V-VI test.”</p>
<p>That’s interesting. My older son took the last NLE test in his fifth and sixth years of Latin, scoring gold the first and a perfect paper the second, but took the AP exam after his fourth year of Latin and got a 5. I asked him, and he said the AP exam was a little harder, but not anything like 10X harder. Maybe you had a bad day the day you took the AP exam?</p>
<p>@notjoe: I did have a very bad test day for the AP Latin exam (no sleep the night before, took the exam directly after the AP Literature exam). Also, I felt disadvantaged by the lack of AP Latin preparatory books: because the exam is so new, there aren’t any Barron’s/5Steps/PR books.</p>
<p>That said, I still think the AP Latin exam is extremely difficult.</p>