The College Greek Exam

Albert T. Watanabe (Louisiana State University)

While enrollments in Greek at all levels are still modest, growth seems to be steady and Greek teachers need to be considering the future of Greek pedagogy at both the collegiate and pre-collegiate level. Traditionally, teachers of Greek have employed as many different theories and devices as there are grains of sand, but in an age of focus on assessment and testing, we should plan out some pedagogical goals and means of measuring progress toward them before someone else does it for us or rather than be continually marginalized for failure to do so.

At the high school level, the National Greek Exam (NGE) has been flourishing in recent years. The syllabi and different levels now provide some stability for teachers and the popularity of the exam is its own proof of success. Student achievement on the NGE also suggests that college-level students would both benefit from analogous testing (if nothing else as a means of comparing results from different institutions) and a stable set of goals for programs around the country and even the globe.

Accordingly, it has become desirable to institute a separate, if parallel set of exams for college programs, the College Greek Exam (CGE). The exam generally follows the format of exams such as the NLE and NGE but has a syllabus, vocabulary lists, and expectations geared specifically to students at the college level.

In the academic year 2007-2008, college programs that had previously participated in the NGE were invited to administer an experimental version of the CGE. This paper will provide general information about the exam, sample syllabi, and give a preliminary report on the progress of administering the exam this year and the next year. There will also be some general comments for the benefit of college teachers in different types of programs using different textbooks who are interested in administering the CGE in the future.