Last Tuesday, I sat the first paper of my Latin GCSE, which is the Latin Language paper (the next two are Prose Literature, then Verse Literature). I’ve been revising for this exam specifically for about three and a half months now, although I started learning Latin itself years ago, and on top of that I had been doing quite well in past papers and was pretty confident going into the exam. But then disaster struck.
The paper was so much harder than any past papers I’d ever done! I was faced with vocab I had never seen before, declensions and verb endings that had never been tested on in any past papers, and I felt this weighty dread loom over me as I skipped through the pages to find at least one passage to translate that I felt confident about, to no avail.
That said, I don’t think that I actually failed the paper. I don’t really want to think about what percentage I might have got though; I just want to focus on the literature aspects now and try to focus on doing well in these next two papers, and then just not think about it again until results day.
However, there is a beacon of hope in the distance! My mum is on a Facebook group for parents of people sitting Latin exams, and apparently a lot of people said that their children found this exam really difficult as well. That’s good news because it means that hopefully grade boundaries for that exam will be lower this year.
Keep your eye out for my results day post!