The National Latin Exam Has Some Questions to Answer About Their Writing Committee

From selection of writers to procedures for accountability, why do we know so little about the committee responsible for the National Latin Exam?

Earlier today, the National Latin Exam released a statement on diversity and inclusion that left more questions than answers. Though the NLE admitted the exam has “included passages which made light of or misrepresented enslaved people and the institution of slavery, perpetuated prejudice against persons of color, portrayed women in characters and roles subservient to men, and sanitized as love stories myths containing rape,” we do not know much about how these kinds of questions were included year after year.

A flurry of problematic questions have appeared on the National Latin Examination since its first exam in 1978 after its founding a year earlier. The questions and passages on the exams are written and constructed by the National Latin Examination’s Writing Committee, and those questions and passages have sanitized slavery and rape, only represent women’s roles and their actions in relation to men, and present stereotypical portrayals of persons of color. These questions are publicly available, and a variety of Latin teachers and scholars, among others, have commented on their problematic nature.

The NLE is used in a variety of ways. For some schools, it’s merely a competition. For some students, it’s a way to potentially access scholarship money. For some states, its results can be used to obtain a Seal of Biliteracy in Latin. With an Exam that can hold heavy stakes for some students and schools — and for an Exam that has historically produced extremely problematic questions, not drawn and contextualized within authentic Latin, but written and constructed by individuals on the NLE’s Writing Committee — we should be critical of who is writing this exam, especially since over 130,000 students took it in 2018, and in the Exam’s lifetime, over 4 million students have taken it, according to today’s statement.

Unfortunately, the process for joining the NLE’s Writing Committee is not transparent, and perhaps, outside of the Committee’s conversations, non-existent. The last person who was added to the Writing Committee’s roster was Deb Heaton in 2016. Mark Keith has held the role of Co-Chair of the NLE since at least 2003, if not earlier (the year that the NLE first published their website; I accessed the 2003 website via cache). It is not clear who these individuals are, other than their current institutional affiliations. It is equally unclear what processes they went through to be appointed to these roles.

While the NLE’s recent Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion statement discusses future plans for an application process to the Committee, it is as equally important to know the organization’s historical practices in recruiting and appointing individuals in the past.

• Have the individuals merely bee appointed to the Writing Committee by the co-chairs?
• Are there term limits?
• What makes an individual qualified to sit on the NLE’s Writing Committee?
• Why are some individuals selected over others?
• Will the people responsible for years of problematic questions continue to serve as writers?

This concealed practice ultimately reflects the poor functioning of the NLE. If we don’t even know how the individuals got there, what are the protocols for keeping these individuals accountable, especially when they write and construct problematic questions to which hundreds of thousands of students have been exposed? Even now as the NLE begins to face the extent of the damage their distortions of Classics has caused, these questions about the writing committee remain shrouded in secrecy.

How individuals are selected and appointed to — and removed from — writing the nation’s largest Latin language examination needs to be made explicit and clear. NLE, do better.