I am curious to learn if there is a way of assessing one’s competency in Greek – either Attic, Homeric, Koine or other – equivalent to CEFR. I realize there can be no direct comparison to the modern system. ‘Can interact with native speakers’ (B2) hardly applies to an an ancient language. I ask because I have been studying Greek on my own for some time and can honestly say I have no real way of assessing what progress I have made. That I now need to look up only every other word is hardly a scientific marker. Perhaps other learners have the same dilemma.
Michael
The National Greek Examination:
https://www.aclclassics.org/National-Student-Exams/National-Greek-Exam
To the OP: I wonder whether it would be possible to establish CEFR equivalence, given that language-learning when it comes to Greek would naturally incline to large discrepancies in training which would be unequivocally counted deficiencies if the same were present in a modern language; that is, you will get plenty of people out of a university Classics course - the majority I’d think - being able to read Greek much better than they can a modern language they studied in school, but their speaking skills, even if they made effort in that regard, would be much worse, and their writing somewhere in between. You do not find as many students of modern languages who can easily read a book of poetry but are unable to write a single sentence easily & comfortably without a multitude of grammatical errors (let alone who could hold a conversation comfortably without errors). That is to say - of the four aspects by which modern language competency is generally measured, the standards vary widely for most students of Greek between reading and writing/speaking.
I couldn’t find a paper or example questions online. Could you explain how this is different from other typical school exams? (like UK GCSE or GCE, AP in the US, etc.) And how it has a similarity to CEFR etc.
I used to give the NGE when teaching at a prior school that had both Latin and Greek. I thought I remembered there being practice exams available like the NLE (National Latin Exam), but maybe I was simply misremembering or perhaps they’ve changed it. So you mean this:
https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/exams-and-tests/cefr/
I have seen in various lists people discussing these levels of proficiency (usually with regard to Latin), but I’ve never seen reference to any exam or assessment which evaluates it from that perspective.
I am familiar with GSCE (or, rather IGSCE) and the International Baccalaureate programs, and while there is a ready comparison between modern language and CEFR, this doesn’t exist - for obvious reasons - for Ancient Greek or Latin. My original post was to inquire whether there was some other scale out there that I was unaware of which could give the autodidact at least a rough idea of where they were on the learning path. The above programs and the NGE are institution-based and are either not available to or not appropriate for an adult self-learner. In front of me on my desk I have copies of Assimil Sans Peine Le Grec Ancien and the Assimil Sans Peine L’Allemand. The cover of the latter clearly states that the textbook will take you to B2. No such claim for the Ancient Greek. In its Introduction it does say that the objective of the book is to guide you vers la lecture des oeuvres classiques en vous facilitant les premiers pas. At least that’s something, but it’s still pretty vague.
My guess is such a measuring scale doesn’t currently exist and those with the necessary skills are too busy with other things.
Michael
Someone on Textkit could prepare a list of variable difficulty Unseens, give some rules for fairness (I’d suggest closed book, no resources) and ask people to email in submissions, along with their Greek level. It would provide as good a measure as any.
Or more people could start contributing to the Bowen’s Greek Unseens thread.
What’s wrong with them?
That is to say, what’s wrong with the traditional route of examinations (that is, high-school followed by university exams)? Seems the same as jeidsath’s idea essentially (but better because the route of unseens has been chosen with considerable care by professionals) - test via unseens, which gradually get harder. You could follow the hardest university exams currently out there by simply going back in time: once you reach, say, 1900, the pieces tested are as difficult or harder than randomly chosen pages from the middle of a Latin author. (At this point you might want to take over with random passages from authors)
And I am sure you could find past papers for most of these online, or, if not, buy them (for a minute fraction of the price of a CEFR test).
As for a lack of ‘availability’, certainly, if you are looking for someone to whom you (an adult) can submit a test and say ‘tell me how good I am!’, that is not available. Classics is an academic rather than functional field; just as you cannot take a credible online test that will tell you your ‘CEFR equivalent’ level of mathematics or physics, you cannot do this with Classics; the reason the option exists and is popular with modern languages is their functional use - that is, one needs to know if the school or job or life they are about to undertake abroad is one for which they are equipped (as do those who are about to take them on) given the necessities of the environment they will be in. It is not a matter of having a score to your name so you know your own capabilities (out of curiosity), but of practical utility to know how you will be received by the actual people with whom you will be compelled to interact. The label of the CEFR score opens doors in the form of interactions with individuals (or institutions, or jobs, etc.) with whom it is understood you could not otherwise establish that level of rapport. Why do you think people are willing to spend hundreds of euros on CEFR exams?
I’m sure if you want to take a GCSE exam and have a GCSE examiner mark it for you to exam standards, £250 would suffice to procure one. 
As an addendum, I personally don’t think basic ability to translate is the best indicator above the level of beginners - for example, I’d be more impressed by someone who could read Demosthenes fluently and compose good Greek prose easily than someone who could read, say, Sophocles fluently but has no ability in prose comp. The former person seems to me to have acquired a higher level of fundamentals in the Greek language.
Looking at the descriptors, the CEFR is a test of communicative competencies. Imagine teaching a modern language cut off from all speakers, just reading a dozen works, pronouncing the language in a few different way, and illustrating the life of the people in the books by showing showing photos of a few derelict and abandoned buildings along with some broken objects in glass cases in a museum. The rubric for the CEFR test would not be applicable. On the plus side, dislocating student progress from communicative competency allows more scope to develop other areas.
It is possible to gain higher scores in unseens by guessing. The aim is to test the breadth and depth of a students knowledge by requiring them to flexibly use their knowledge of the Greek that they have seen in other contexts in the unseen contexts. That works well provided that the student leaves blanks for what they don’t know. If a student is a risk-taker, and dares to guess, that student will probably score higher than their actual knowledge of Greek should allow them to score. An unseen test becomes a test a general cognitive ability, orderliness of thought, common sense imagination and English compositional ability, as much as it is a test of Greek.
Related to unseens is skimming skills. Given an unseen passage and a time-limit of 2 minutes, a competent reader can probably get the general gist and many of the details too. The Read Some Greek (RSG) app available on the app store, contains two simpe passages. While all words are indexed and display if pressed, it seems that the ones the authour expects or allows us to look up, are the underlined ones. It would be good if that app had more than just the two passages though.
In addition to quantifiable things, some aesthetics such as whether a student feels happy and confident when reading Greek are also important, but are perhaps not really competencies.