Latin Alevel Prose Comp vs Unseen Comprehension

hi, I am currently studying OCR latin alevel (year 13) and have just finished my Prose Comp course - I recently found out that prose comp is actually optional and that in the exam you can choose between a comprehension on a latin passage with grammar questions and a prose comp passage. I moved school for ALevel and at GCSE I never did any prose comp (you could choose between comprehension and PC at GCSE). I always did the comprehension and grammar questions at GCSE.

When I asked my teacher, they suggested that we do the PC section because the comprehension is done from very complicated/largely unadapted Latin passages. If other people were given similar advice then I'll take their word for it and do the PC, but tbh I would rather save myself the time and effort of learning all these grammar rules/exceptions and all the vocab english-> latin if I can.

Also, latin is my 4th alevel and i'm applying for Medicine at uni, so it's not like I need to be able to do PC for my later studies or anything like that.

I also just think that the Ovid unseen is already pretty complex, and what with all the Literature and Latin->English translation I've already done/will have to do for the Alevel, is it not more sensible just to fully commit to the Latin->English stuff because then any practice for all the sections will sort of help each other? e.g. for me I have to learn vocab separately for the english to latin and the latin to english, so i'll have to spend extra time doing each separately. also there are just so many complicated exceptions for PC which I'm not sure I'll ever really understand/learn and so I feel that might affect my performance in that section?

I was wondering whether anyone could tell me which section they chose and why? And also what advice your school gave you?

Reply 1

bacchae

My school only taught prose comp at A Level as they said the comprehension was marked more harshly, so if you were good at prose comp it was easier to get a higher mark in it.

We did one or two comprehensions just because and personally I preferred prose comp as I found the comprehension mark scheme way more confusing. I'd suggest having a look at some past papers and seeing how you find both prose comp and comprehension

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