Every spring, students across North America sit for the Universal Latin Exam — a competition administered to thousands of learners enrolled in classical schools throughout the United States. Unlike the more widely known National Latin Exam, which tests broader knowledge of Latin language and Roman culture, the ULE is deliberately and rigorously philological: it examines how precisely students understand the mechanics of the Latin language itself — the grammar, the cases, the syntax — stripped of any curriculum advantage. There is no coasting on context clues. There is only Latin, understood or not.
This year, two Emerson Latin students entered that national arena. Both of them came home with the Caesar Award — the silver medal, and the second-highest honor the ULE bestows.
Olivia Hwang competed in the upper elementary division. Min Yang competed in the middle school division. Two students, two different levels, one shared result: recognized among the top-ranking Latin students in their grade groups nationwide.
Awarded to those who demonstrate exceptional command of Latin grammar and syntax in a philologically rigorous national examination. Two students entered. Both placed.
- Olivia HwangUpper Elementary Division
- Min YangMiddle School Division
We are proud of them — not simply for the medals, but for what those medals represent. The ULE is not a measure of memory or exposure. It is a measure of genuine grammatical understanding, built over months of patient, careful study. Olivia Hwang and Min Yang have shown that they understand Latin. Not approximately. Not roughly. They understand it the way it asks to be understood.
Macte virtute.
Two students entered. Two students placed. That ratio deserves to be named plainly: a perfect result, in a competition that awards nothing for effort and nothing for proximity to the correct answer.
The ULE is not the NLE. This distinction matters, and the record ought to state it clearly. Where the National Latin Exam surveys the broad terrain of Roman language and civilization — grammar alongside culture, literature, and mythology — the Universal Latin Exam narrows its lens to a single question: does this student actually understand the grammar? Case endings without ambiguity. Syntactic constructions without approximation. The philological core of Latin, examined with no softening and no interpretive latitude. It is, in this sense, the most honest examination the classical curriculum offers. There is nowhere to hide.
In 2023, the last year this record shows ULE participation, Emerson Latin entered a larger cohort and returned five Augustus Awards (Gold) and two Caesar Awards (Silver) — seven placers in all. The 2026 field was smaller: two students, two different divisions, two different levels of the grammar. And yet both placed. There is something worth attending to in that. The program did not send a large delegation and harvest results from the top of it. It sent two students — and both of them were good enough.
Olivia Hwang and Min Yang sit at different stages of the curriculum. Olivia in the upper elementary division, Min in the middle school. They share no competitive category and were measured against entirely separate national fields. That both should earn the Caesar Award in the same year, across separate divisions, is less a coincidence than a confirmation: that grammatical precision, as it is cultivated here, reaches students at each stage of their formation, and holds.
Congratulations to both of them. They entered a national examination that tests nothing but mastery, and they answered it with mastery.