@NEPatsGirl, what a wonderful option. We will check into it.
Thank you Parents Forum family for your support.
@Cobrat, yep, the foreign language classes are very fast paced at Oberlin! My son studied his tail off in elementary Japanese last year, and even after only a few days of classes this year, he expects Japanese to be his most difficult course.
Colleges usually require a language placement test so that you wind up in the right course. If the OP’s son can only take a semester of a foreign language (why is this?), he should stick with the one he has already started to learn.
@massmom, thank you so much
While admittedly intensive, the pacing and workload in the foreign language courses at Oberlin are no different from those at most peer colleges or the elite/Ivies.
Many of the foreign language texts we used at Oberlin were developed/used at Princeton and other peer elite colleges.
For that reason, if a student who wanted to leapfrog from first to third year Chinese/Japanese took the equivalent second year course at Harvard summer school or even better…the Middlebury summer immersion program…he/she’d be well prepared to place into and succeed in the third year course as those courses are comparable to Oberlin’s in pacing. .