I am currently a high school junior at a nationally ranked public school. I have decent grades, and the colleges that I will be looking at (university of Toronto, northeastern, reed, uconn, university of Washington, GW to name a few) are relatively competetive, no necessarily by CC’s standards of course.
My issue is that I am enrolled in an early college experience class through my state school for Latin 4/5. I barely scraped by with and A- my freshman and sophomore years, and I struggle with basic concepts. I might not even pull a B in this class, and I am already taking AP and other high level classes in addition I took this class because it was the only other Latin class offered after Latin 3. I have three credits (my class in 8th grade counts as a high school credit) but I am concerned that my situation will prevent me from being competitive in the admissions process. I want to drop the class and take a study hall this semester and another elective the next in its place. Is it okay to have 3 years of a foreign language and not take one my junior and senior year? I would probably major in business or political science, possibly psychology. Thanks!
Check the requirements for each of your colleges. In general 3 years is fine, but check each to verify.
Is there another language that interests you? If Latin 4 is not shown in your school report, the colleges will have no way of knowing that it was offered to you. Many schools will be ok with you taking two years of two or in your case a 3 and 2! Don’t be too worried about it and if you think you can do well on the SAT subject test maybe prepare and take latin.
Either way as long as you present a polished application I doubt something as simple as that would be the end of it. That being said consider carefully whether your counselor will mark that you took the most challenging courses on your rec, that too is very important!
University of Toronto doesn’t care how many years of foreign language you have.
Actually, in many cases, yes they will. Accompanying the Secondary School Report is often the school profile which provides, among other things, a listing of honors/advanced/AP classes by department.
That said, I don’t believe any of these schools request 4 years of a language, so you would be fine.
My daughter was in the same position with having Spanish 2 as a freshman and Spanish 3 as a sophomore. Though she is not looking at the most competitive schools, all of the admissions counselors we’ve spoken to said that she would be fine with those credits, some of these being from schools considered very or highly competitive.
Note that the admission counselors would like to convince more students to apply. They are not promising you anything. When a school strongly recommend 3 or 4 years of a world language, having 3 years does fulfill the requirement, but it may not look as good if most students took 4 years.