More on Latin and its usefulness in gaining admission to college, from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Friday, March 13, 2009

Not much info on Seattle from the Latin Wikipedia: "Seattlum (Anglice: Seattle) est urbs maioris momenti in Vasingtonia Civitate Civitatum Foederatarum Americae."


Seattlepi.com (Seattle Post-Intelligencer) has an article on Latin as taught in schools, how it continues to be fairly popular and is steadily growing in strength, etc. About one or two articles of these type usually turn up online every week so there's a lot of repetition but sometimes you can find some new information. Here's what this one has:

Latin and ancient Greek once were considered part of a basic education, but in the 1960s and '70s Latin saw a sharp decline in participants; once a mainstay of academia, many students balked at Latin study once it was no longer required.

Now, what was old is new again. Spurred by academic pressures, students are returning to Latin studies, hoping to increase their standardized test scores and their chances of being accepted to top colleges.

then SAT scores by language (you'll see these numbers quoted a lot):

In 2002, the mean verbal SAT score for Latin students was 666. French, German and Spanish students, meanwhile, achieved a mean score of 637, 622 and 581, respectively. This benefit, says Tibbets, can often entice students to pursue the language.

Finally the new information:

Nearly 19 percent of college admissions officers claimed to respond more favorably to applicants who had studied Latin or ancient Greek, as opposed to a modern language, according to a study by Richard A. LaFleur of the Department of Classics at the University of Georgia.

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