At the September of 2022 I began the gratin IGCSE course, initially coming from the common entrance Latin examinations, I was told that I would walk through the course with minimal effort. That was very wrong. With both Latin and ancient Greek examinations having 3 papers for each exam ‘language, prose literature and verse literature’, I was greeted with a new style of exam I had never come across before, Latin literature. Here the candidate would be required to learn two large sections of either 2 or three set texts (one prose one verse literature). The size of the sections that would be required to be learnt can vary, but a single section of a set text can peak at over 500 lines of Latin translation, much of the Latin text would have to be memorised too as a myriad of style and content points that can be found in each line, style points are the Latin equivalent of literary techniques whereas content points are evaluations of the language and message of a certain phrase or word which could possess greater meaning within the story, are required to be learned for the answering of the 4, 8 and 10 marker questions.
The language exam is ‘luckily’ one paper, and is composed of: 2 comprehensions, a translation from Latin into English, a grammar testing section and an optional English translation into Latin section. In my opinion this paper is the easier of the two as it requires the more familiar side of learning a language including a great deal of vocab learning, whereas the literature is that of more long term block learning that requires intricate analysis of the piece whilst having to know much of it. This course is hard but very fulfilling and helps greatly in improving your note taking and revision skills for if you want a high grade, you’ll need to try your very best.