The National Latin Exam in College?  Why and How

Thomas J. Sienkewicz (Monmouth College)
and Liane Houghtalin (University of Mary Washington)

Did you know that the National Latin Exam is taken by several hundred college students annually?  This crossover into the college curriculum of what is considered by many to be primarily an exam for high school students makes sense, because the first two years of collegiate language instruction (the elementary through intermediate sequence) is usually held to be equivalent to four years of language instruction in high school.  In this presentation the two college representatives to the National Latin Exam Advisory Committee provide some background on the history of the NLE in colleges and universities and a discussion of the benefits of offering the NLE in a college environment.  They also discuss the application procedures and some of the challenges of administering the exam in college.

In particular the presenters will discuss ways in which the NLE can be used as an outcomes assessment tool at the college level.  Using the NLE in such a fashion could provide an outside, objective assessment of an individual student’s mastery of the language and give a sense of how well a Latin program is achieving its goals.  Likewise, because the NLE provides data on how other students at the same level performed elsewhere, administering it could allow comparisons between an individual program and the broader picture across the country.  The presenters have administered the NLE to their own students and will provide specific examples of its use for outcomes assessment at the college level, how the exam can be made to appeal as an assessment tool to college administrations, and what problems the giving of the exam at the college level might run into.  They will also share some preliminary results of a survey of college faculty who have already been administering the NLE, focusing on how those faculty use it, what problems they have run into, and what advice they have for other college faculty planning to use the exam.  Special attention will be paid to an explanation of what is covered at each level of the NLE and what that might mean to college courses.

Some time will be allotted in this presentation for questions and answers, especially those regarding the kinds of information the NLE should post on its web site for college and university teachers and ways to promote its use by college faculty.