Latin is required of honors-track students for several reasons:
1) it furnishes the best background to learning English grammar and vocabulary.
Latin students consistently achieve higher scores on SAT's and other standardized tests.
2) it connects us with the enduring literature and philosophy of ancient Greece and Rome, as well as the traditions of the Latin Church.
3) it makes learning the modern Romance languages easy and pleasurable.
Students should take (or re-take) the Regents Latin exam at the end of Latin III, as part of an 'advanced' NY Regents diploma. In Latin III we read some of the great literature of Greece and Rome: this goal was the whole point of two years of hard study of grammar and vocabulary.