School Assessment: Building the Skills That Are Marked
What school assessment rewards
School assessment in SACE Stage 2 Latin continuers is where your reading, translation and commentary skills are built and first judged, so it rewards steady habits rather than last-minute cramming. The concepts you must command are: accidence (declensions, conjugations, irregular verbs such as esse, posse, ferre, ire, velle), syntax (case usage, subordinate clause types, indirect statement, purpose and result clauses, conditional sentences, gerunds and gerundives), vocabulary in context, translation technique, and literary commentary on the set text - theme, characterisation, structure, and the effect of stylistic devices such as anaphora, chiasmus, hyperbaton, alliteration and metaphor.
Traps that cost marks
- Translating word by word and leaving the English unidiomatic; examiners reward a sentence that reads naturally and preserves sense.
- Ignoring a negative or a prefix (non, nec, in-, haud) that reverses the meaning.
- Misreading case endings where form is ambiguous (-ae genitive/dative/nominative plural; -is dative/ablative plural).
- Missing tense relationships in indirect statement, where the infinitive's tense is relative to the main verb.
- In commentary questions, retelling the plot instead of analysing how the language creates the effect.
- Quoting Latin without translating it, or translating without explaining.
Rule of thumb
Before writing a translation, find the main verb first, then identify the subject from its ending, then attach the remaining words by case. This single habit resolves most dense sentences.
Worked example
Caesar, ubi haec audivit, legatos ad eos misit qui dicerent se pacem velle.
- Main verb: misit (perfect, third singular) - subject Caesar.
- ubi haec audivit - temporal clause, "when he had heard these things".
- legatos ad eos - accusative object and prepositional phrase.
- qui dicerent - relative clause of purpose, subjunctive, "to say".
- se pacem velle - indirect statement; se refers to Caesar, so "that he (Caesar) wanted peace".
Translation: "Caesar, when he had heard these things, sent envoys to them to say that he wanted peace."