<p>Do most schools have their own tests? If you take the AP test, do you have to submit it to colleges? I know there are pros and cons in regards to taking this test, starting with the $80 fee.</p>
<p>Like all AP tests, most colleges do NOT request AP scores until after you are admitted, so the AP score is not usually used as an admittance consideration. For most public U’s, you’ll get not only college credits that count towards graduation, but also place out of earlier courses in that language. (or satisfy gen ed requirements). Private schools vary in how they treat AP credits (you’ll need to check the individual schools’ sites to see how they treat it). At a large public U where D attends, her ‘5’ on the AP German test awarded her 8 hours of credit, which equated to the first 2 language courses at the U. Cons? The test fee, if your high school doesn’t pay for it, and the tests are generally considered to be quite difficult, with no generous curve, as exists in some of the other AP exams.</p>
<p>I doubt there’s any college where you can’t show up and talk or test your way into an appropriate-level language course, as long as you have the goods language-wise. However, there are lots of colleges (not so much the Ivy-type elites as public colleges) where kids can get actual credit, not just placement or distributional credit, for good scores on AP tests. (A few schools will give that for acing their own placement tests, but not many.) So, if you have any interest in graduating early, $80 is not much to pay for four credit hours, or even more.</p>
<p>Another “pro”, I guess, may be the absence of a “con”: If an applicant took an AP language class before his or her senior year in high school, and then did not take the AP test, colleges may discount the course and its grade. Obviously, this doesn’t apply to seniors.</p>
<p>I don’t think there’s any con beyond the $80 fee, especially if you wait till senior year and have some idea as to whether you need to take the test.</p>
<p>I know at Harvard the language requirement can be bypassed with a 600+ on the SAT subject test or a 5 on the AP or a 7 on the IB exam or a departmental exam which at least 30 years ago was very similar to the SAT. I’d think a 600 on the SAT was easier than getting a 5 on the AP.</p>
<p>OTOH Carnegie Mellon (at least the two schools within the school I’m familiar with) have no language requirement at all. However a 5 on the AP will give you a breadth credit. They do have placement tests if you are interested in taking a language and don’t think you need to start at the beginning. I think that is typical.</p>
<p>You never have to submit AP scores to colleges, but most college applications will ask you to self report scores in AP courses you took before senior year.</p>
<p>at Princeton you can place out of the language requirement with a 5 on the AP test or some score on the SATII (700?). If you don’t take either of those, then you have to take the language placement test, which no one actually places out of-- so you would need to take at least one semester of the language.</p>
<p>It really does depend on the school. At Yale, everyone has to take at least a semester of a language no matter what, so a 5 on the AP test wouldn’t help you.</p>
<p>My daughter took AP French and German tests and scored a 3 on each…not enough for credit at college. I do kind of wonder how well the tests actually measure language ability. My D had two years of French in class before taking the AP course via distance learning (which I don’t recommend). She also went through the available two levels of Rosetta Stone on her own and watched a couple of French movies a week for a year, but she really wasn’t near conversant and I was actually surprised that she managed to get a 3 on the AP exam. She also took the French SAT II–don’t remember exactly but got somewhere in the low 700s on that, so it was enough to meet the college language requirement (but of little practical value since she is a Russian major and taking lots of language classes anyway). The 3 on the German language exam was very disappointing to D, and it surprised her teacher, too. D had four years of good classroom instruction and lots of opportunity to practice (we moved to Germany when she was beginning eighth grade). If she had scored a 5 and gotten some credit from her college, I think she might have considered a German minor.</p>
<p>Depends how well you do on the AP test.</p>
<p>My son got a 5 on the Spanish AP test and was given credit for an Intermediate level Spanish class at his college. One less class he has to take, which means he can take a lighter load one semester (probably Sr year when he’s job hunting) or he already has credit for a class if heaven forbid he fails one.</p>
<p>If he didn’t take the AP test he could have place out of lower level Spanish and satisfied his language requirement based on his SAT II score. He probably could have also taken a test the college offered to get place into a higher class. </p>
<p>The difference is he wouldn’t have gotten credit for taking a class, which made the AP exam worth it. In terms of the expenses of college, $80 is nothing.</p>
<p>Has anyone taken a CLEP test? If schools accept them, it looks like you can get more credit than the max of 3 for the AP. I didn’t think about the subject tests. I’ll have to call and ask if any credit can be given for them.</p>
<p>Everything varies from one university to another and sometimes from one college to another within a university.</p>
<p>My daughter is in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell University. She got a 5 on the AP Spanish Language exam, which gave her 3 credits. However, her AP score did not get her out of the language requirement (in Cornell Arts and Sciences, as at Yale, you have to take a semester of language no matter what), and she had to take Cornell’s own advanced standing exam to be placed in the appropriate level of Spanish. If she had not taken the AP test, her score of 760 on the SAT Subject Test in Spanish would have gained her the right to take the advanced standing exam (any score 690 or above will do that) and therefore to be placed into a relatively advanced course, but she would not have gotten the 3 credits. If she were in any college at Cornell other than Arts and Sciences, she would not have had to meet a foreign language requirement at all.</p>
<p>Is this confusing enough for you?</p>
<p>By the way, my daughter says that the AP Spanish Language test was by far the hardest AP test she ever took – and she took eight of them. It requires intense concentration to focus for three hours (plus a separate oral section) on a test conducted in a language that is not your native language.</p>
<p>At Stanford you can get out of language requirement with high AP or SAT score.</p>
<p>A word of warning from personal experience: you can do TOO well on language placement tests. I did quite well on the placement test at my university, and was placed in the “appropriate” French class. It turned out that I was far behind the other students in the class, especially with respect to conversation. So I would advise anyone to do some investigation about what’s involved in college language levels, and not to necessarily rely on the outcome of a test (especially if you test well).</p>
<p>Hunt, that same thing happened to me, the parent, when I started college. They let me drop back a class, even though I’d tested out of it, and I still ended up getting a D. I hope what happened to us was a “fluke”.</p>
<p>Some people have a knack for doing well on tests, especially standardized tests. This knack served me well in most situations–but the French placement was one situation where it betrayed me. I remember thinking, “Wait–all these people can actually speak French!” I also think that everybody in the class but me had been to France.</p>
<p>If one of your target colleges happens to accept the CLEP Spanish Test, my daughter did both and said the CLEP was much easier than the AP Spanish Test. Some colleges count both, of course. The fun of CLEP tests is that you know your score (and whether you met your college’s required score) by the end of the test.</p>
<p>being placed in a class way beyond your ability to hear or speak..if you are a good reader of the written word is a common story for college freshmen ( I wept when I got to my upper level class and realized I was there sheerly on my ability to read and decipher–way out of my league..but not exactly a major world crisis either)…on the other hand…getting out of two semesters of language for instance gives you two more electives…which can be quite handy if you have gone astray and changed majors and are a bit short in the hours available to strike out on a new path..or you double major.</p>