<p>At my school we start in 6th grade, and you can only take the AP if you're in honors up until senior year (otherwise you take ____ 5)- this applies only to French and Spanish, not Latin. Generally speaking, your teacher is right, even at my school (VERY highly ranked public), people do generally badly on the exams unless they're a native speaker. Same thing applies ott he SAT II's. MY friend took the SAT II in Chinese, and got a 780- sounds good, right? Wrong. That put him in the 76th percentile.</p>