<p>Can anyone describe the difference in difficulty and content of the Spanish SAT Subject test, the Spanish online placement exam, and the Dept Placement Exam if a student gets above a 546 and wants to gain a waiver? </p>
<p>Also, how do students schedule fall semesters if they do not know how they will do on the placement exam and want to take Spanish 140 in the fall if they are not exempt? Is 140 easy to get into during the first week, so students create a schedule assuming they will gain the waiver and then switch a course to 140 if they don't?</p>
<p>I took both the Chinese & Spanish placement exams, and ended up placing out of the requirement via Chinese. </p>
<p>1) You can take the Spanish placement test before the Advanced Registration process. It’s an online exam (as you noted in your post) that once you get your PennKey/Penn ID #, I believe you can take (and you get this info before Adv. Reg.). </p>
<p>2) The online exam tells you if you place into 110, 120, 130, 140, or 140+. Foreign language classes are notorious for being tough to get into, because each section is capped at 15-ish kids. If you take the online exam and get the “140+”, that simply means you need to take an oral exam on campus to fully place out of the language requirement. If you do get the “140+” category, I’d sign up for 140 just to be safe, and then drop it if you place out of Spanish after the in person oral assessment (which happens during NSO).</p>
<p>As an anecdote, I studied Spanish in HS for 3 years, and placed comfortably into 130.</p>
<p>Thanks hardworking. Suppose a student gets above a 546 on the Spanish online test and wants to do the NSO test to qualify for the waiver. Are you sure that is an oral only exam or might it be a multiple choice written test or both? Somewhere it is described as a one hour test, but it doesn’t talk about how the students are tested or what the content is. Somehow I was thinking it was oral if you got 600 - 650 in the SAT Subject test, but written if you got 546+ on the Penn online test. Can anyone clarify?</p>
<p>I’m not fully sure on what’s present during the NSO exam; I just know that there is an oral portion because they cannot test that online. [And if you don’t want to take foreign language at Penn, they definitely want to make sure you can actually speak the language!]</p>