Three Fives: Chaeyoon Lee, Hailey Park and Aeden Hwang

The AP Latin exam is scored from 1 to 5. This year, Chaeyoon Lee, Hailey Park and Aeden Hwang each received a 5.

A 5 on AP Latin is earned on Vergil’s Aeneid and on Latin prose, read in the original, at sight and from the syllabus, under time. Of all the students around the world who sat the exam this year, about one in five earned it. There is no way to bluff it. It is the record of a year of reading, sentence by sentence, done well.

Chaeyoon Lee

Chaeyoon, at Cheongshim International Academy, runs an Instagram account of her own that explains English words through their Latin roots. This year she also won Gold on the National Latin Vocabulary Exam and was inducted into the National Latin Honor Society. Her turning point was the subjunctive, which she mapped out use by use until she could see the differences rather than merely recall them.

Hailey Park

Hailey did something with her Latin that few students think to do: she gave it away. In November 2025 she founded Little Latin Lab, an after-school class that introduces fourth and fifth graders at her school to Latin through games, crafts, cooking and role-play. With support from the Paideia Institute it grew from eight students to fifteen, and she now offers to help other students start one of their own.

Aeden Hwang

Aeden took the road many boarding school students take, and took it early: he began Latin before boarding school and finished Oxford Latin while still in middle school. For AP, already at boarding school in the United States, he set himself two aims beyond the syllabus: to know every required reading thoroughly before May, and to work real AP questions in every class. He met both, and the score says so.

Three roads, one standard

The three arrived by different roads, and the difference is the interesting part. Chaeyoon studies at Cheongshim International Academy, one of the most demanding schools in Korea. Hailey came to the exam having already taught Latin to children half her age, which is the surest test of whether one understands a thing. Aeden came from an American boarding school, where Latin was available to him five days a week, and still chose to prepare with us. Schools do not usually hand out testimonials, but students who already have a Latin teacher and look for another one are saying something.

None of the three was preparing for a score alone. One teaches vocabulary to strangers online, one built a class for children, one built a plan. The 5 came along with the habits, which is the order in which it usually comes.

The ledger

This page is the fifth entry in a short record. William Kim of Seoul Foreign School earned a 5 in 2022, the first. Elena Lee of CheongShim earned a 5 in 2023. Four students earned a 5 in the same sitting in 2024, and two in 2025. With Chaeyoon, Hailey and Aeden, that makes eleven in five years.

Read as a sequence, the record says less about any one year than about the range of places these students came from: an international school in Seoul, an online high school attended from Korea, a national academy in the mountains of Gangwon, a Christian academy in the capital, and now an American boarding school. The schools have almost nothing in common. The standard has not changed.

Macte virtute.

AP Latin at Emerson Latin runs as two weekly courses, Prose on Saturdays and Poetry on Sundays, through the May exam. Students who are behind can catch up in eight days over the December break; the details are here.