The National Mythology Exam is administered annually to more than six thousand students across approximately three hundred schools in the United States and internationally. It covers the stories, genealogies, and figures of the Greek and Roman traditions in the form they have accumulated across millennia of retelling — not as isolated items to be identified but as a living fabric of reference and allusion. Two Emerson Latin students answered every question correctly. The full record is set down below.
- Gio Hyung
- Haeun Kim
- Alexander Hyun Lee
- Sophia Yunchae Park
- Jehyeong Suh
- Charles Cho
- Min-Chae Kang
- Eunwoo Yoo
The Perfect Paper deserves its own sentence. The NME covers a field wide enough that a student who has read carefully and broadly will still encounter questions that test the edges of what they know — minor figures, obscure genealogies, the finer distinctions between versions of a myth that has been retold a dozen times by a dozen authors. To answer every question correctly across that range, in a field of more than six thousand, is not a result that comes from selective preparation. It comes from a genuinely inhabited knowledge of the classical tradition. Gio Hyung and Haeun Kim achieved it. That is the whole of what needs to be said about them.
Jehyeong Suh appears this year in the NME record, as he does in the NLE and NLVE records for the same year — three examinations, three disciplines, three placements. The mythology examination is the broadest of the three in subject matter and the most resistant to the kind of targeted effort that can compensate for gaps in formation. To place in all three in a single year is to have demonstrated something consistent and durable, not something situational. We congratulate all eight placing students.