The Universal Latin Exam is a different kind of test from the examinations that make up most of this record. Where the National Latin Exam asks students to read Latin — to encounter a passage and give an account of it — the ULE asks students to account for the language itself: its grammatical forms, their names, their logic, their relationships to one another. It is the difference between reading a piece of music and being asked to name every note, interval, and harmonic structure within it. Both require knowledge of Latin. They require different kinds of knowledge, and they reward different kinds of formation. In its second year, competing against their North American peers, five Emerson Latin students earned the Augustus Award (Gold) and two earned the Caesar Award (Silver). The full record is set down below.
- Charles Cho
- Jaye Cho
- Jeongho Hong
- Hunjae Lee
- Kelly Sung
- Esther Chae
- Rachel Lee
The naming of the awards — Augustus and Caesar — is not merely decorative. It places the examination within a Roman political vocabulary in which the title of Caesar designated the heir apparent, the next in succession, and Augustus designated the one who had already arrived and consolidated authority. A student who earns the Augustus Award has demonstrated not only that they know the forms but that they can move among them with the fluency of someone for whom the grammar is no longer a foreign system but a familiar one. Kelly Sung, who appears elsewhere in this record for her first-place finish in South Korea at the International Philosophy Olympiad, adds a Gold Medal here in a competition that asks for an entirely different kind of Latin knowledge. That breadth is worth noting.