The College Board has released the results of the 2025 AP Latin Examination. Two Emerson Latin students received a score of 5 — the highest the examination awards, earned by fewer than one in eight candidates worldwide. The examination demands close reading of original Latin in both the epic and prose traditions, translation under examination conditions, and sustained analytical writing about the literature of Caesar and Vergil. A 5 records demonstrated command of the language and the texts. Nothing else will produce it.
The highest score the College Board awards. Earned by fewer than 12% of candidates.
- Jonghyun SeoKorean Minjok Leadership Academy — Hoengseong, Gangwon, Korea
- Sean Seungwoo LeeChadwick International — Songdo, Incheon, Korea
The two students come from institutions of markedly different character, and the contrast is worth naming. Jonghyun Seo attends the Korean Minjok Leadership Academy — KMLA — a highly selective independent boarding school in the mountains of Gangwon Province, 120 kilometers east of Seoul. Founded with the explicit ambition of becoming Korea’s Eton, KMLA operates with full curricular independence and is among the most demanding academic environments in the country. Its philosophy is rooted in national identity and humanistic formation. That a student shaped by that environment should bring his Latin to the AP examination and earn the highest score is a confirmation that the discipline KMLA cultivates and the Latin Emerson Latin teaches are not in tension — they compound.
Sean Seungwoo Lee attends Chadwick International in Songdo — an IB-curriculum international day school affiliated with Chadwick School in Palos Verdes, California. Where KMLA is grounded in Korean tradition, Chadwick is outward-facing, cosmopolitan, and deliberately international. Two schools, two traditions, one standard — and both students met it.
Both have distinguished themselves beyond the AP examination as well. In the international competitions in Latin and classical humanities, each has earned Gold Medals and Summa Cum Laude recognition — distinctions that measure a different and broader range of classical competencies. To excel in both arenas requires a formation that is neither narrow nor contingent. Jonghyun and Sean have demonstrated both.
Emerson Latin congratulates them on results that reflect the seriousness of their preparation and the depth of their engagement with the Latin language.
Macte virtute.
The record in this ledger has been building steadily. William Kim of Seoul Foreign School earned a 5 in 2022 — the first entry, the result that established what was possible. Elena Lee of CheongShim Academy earned a 5 in 2023. In 2024, four students earned a 5 in the same sitting: Susie Yang and Gene Yang of Stanford Online High School (attending virtually from Seoul), Hunjae Lee of Seoul International Christian Academy, and Jerome Kwon of Daegu International School. In 2025: Jonghyun Seo of KMLA and Sean Seungwoo Lee of Chadwick International.
Read as a sequence, the record is striking less for the number of students than for the range of institutions behind them. A boarding school on the American East Coast. A national academy in the mountains of Gangwon. An online high school based in California, attended from Seoul. A Christian academy in the Korean capital. An international school in Daegu. Korea’s most selective domestic boarding school. One of its most cosmopolitan international schools. These institutions share almost nothing in common except the students they produced — and the standard those students met. The common thread is neither a type of school nor a type of student. It is a standard of preparation that has held, without exception, across every year this record contains.