<p>I'm wondering how much it would help to take my native language subject test and score 800 :)
Worth a try?</p>
<p>I did the Spanish one and got an 800. Don’t know how much it helped. Waitlist at HYP. Accept at Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Vandy. Take that for what it’s worth among other things. Also remember that tests such as Spanish have extremely high amounts of 800s. I was only in the 92nd percentile with a perfect score. Which one are you taking?</p>
<p>So 8% scored 800 huh? I’m going to take one of the Asian languages 
Are you native spanish speaker?</p>
<p>Use common sense and think about how adcom view this.</p>
<p>Harvard adcom specifically told my info session not to do this.</p>
<p>Only is beneficial if you are applying to a school that has some sort of point system for scores, without distinguishing among the tests, i.e. UC system.</p>
<p>There are tons of Chinese and Korean native speakers submitting 800 scores in their native languages.</p>
<p>It’s okay to do this at any college if the test takes you to more than the number of SAT Subject Tests required by your college. My son has two (arguably three) native languages, one of those languages being English, and he may, depending on scheduling, take the SAT Subject Test in another language we have spoken at home. But he already has more than enough SAT Subject Tests scores in other subjects.</p>
<p>What if you don’t speak Mandarin Chinese at home, and instead, an entirely different dialect of Chinese. The Chinese language evaluated on the SAT Subject Test would then be to you, an entirely new/different language. </p>
<p>Should you take it anyway, if you’ve already been studying Mandarin Chinese at school for 5 years? Could you have your counselor make a note of this to colleges, that Mandarin Chinese is not your native language and that you had to actually put effort to learn this new language?</p>
<p>Then would an 800 in Chinese Subject Test be considered acceptable? Would colleges look at it differently or would they just disregard the note because you are Chinese by race.</p>
<p>I purposely didn’t take Korean even though I could have gotten an 800 on it.</p>
<p>I instead bombed Math IIC with a 750.</p>
<p>If you are literate in your home language and there is an SAT subject test, AP exam, or CLEP exam in that language, you should take it. That way you will have a number you can show someone someday to demonstrate your proficiency. Unless of course you have a pal who can administer the U.S. Foreign Service language exam for you and give you a score for that one!</p>
<p>Depending on the college/university you ultimately attend, having a decent test score in your home language may place you out of the foreign language requirement, or at least into a more interesting, higher level course.</p>
<p>^That may be so, but for admissions purposes it’s just a bad idea (unless you’ve already met the requirement for subject tests). Taking the Korean subject test, for example, and scoring an 800 tells an adcom that you speak fluent Korean–not so impressive if you’ve been speaking it your entire life. It would be the equivalent of taking an alternate CR test, which instead of asking you to infer themes from dense, academic texts, asks you to infer the word “car” from “automobile.”</p>
<p>It’s better than nothing, but I wouldn’t count a native language SAT II as one of the required tests. For example, I scored an 800 on the Korean SAT II but am still taking 2~3 more SAT IIs for schools that require 2~3 tests.</p>
<p>wait, but monroylobo said he got 800 on spanish and was admitted to colleges of his choice. then why bother to take some other test than korean if you are already so fluent? regardless of how many koreans take it, isn’t all that matters is that you get accepted?? i dont see why one should take other tests when they can score 800 on korean.</p>