I got a 70% on my French midterm and I’m freaking out because due to the way my school weights midterms/finals, it brought my grade down to an 82% semester grade. The class I’m currently taking (sophomore year) is French 3, and if I keep my schedule as it’s set for next year I’ll be taking Honors French 4 (no academic French option). I’m now wondering if I should switch to Spanish 1 (then Spanish 2 senior year) since I know I could probably do much better in it, or if colleges would rather see me struggle a bit in French 4.
Not sure they would care too much either way, but many colleges have a foreign language requirement. You could find yourself having to take a language in college vs. placing out of it, and that can be tougher than high school. I am sympathetic – my kids were terrible at French. They stuck it out… D2 had Bs all the way through high school in it, and still got into U of Chicago & Swarthmore. She did have great test scores, though. Just my opinion, a lot of schools are slightly more forgiving of Bs in foreign language than in core academic subjects.
Highest level completed is usually more important than number of years taken.
If you think you can get a B in French 4, I would take that.
I’d do French 4.
Take French 4 and try to get a B in it. 4 years of a foreign language matters to colleges (especially the most selective ones, let’s say anything top 50) and 1 year in a foreign language is considered worthless.
Go for French 4 and just do your best. Or, stop at 3 and put something challenging in French 4’s spot, like, an extra AP or something you would not have had room for. Don’t put an easy class like Spanish 1 in that spot.
At one of the top schools we visited (MIT?) here’s what the admin. guy told us. Take at least 3 years of the SAME language. We see so many kids who take 2 years of one language and 2 years of another and think it’s the same as 4 years of language. It’s not, and we discard them both. We heard this more than once. Get involved with the french club, get tutoring and talk with the teacher and try to secure at least a B, but stick with french. GOod luck!
I think colleges want to see the same language, so you’re better off staying in French. Study as hard as you can to raise your grade by the end of the year and just do your best next year.
As long as you are not planning on applying to colleges that request level 4 of a foreign language, you plan of action is viable. Personally, I would go with French IV unless you have developed an overwhelming desire to learn Spanish and plan to continue it in college.
If you drop French, take an Honors or AP class, NOT Spanish 1.
(For college admissions, what matters is level reached.)
As others have pointed out, adcoms care about the classes you took as well as your GPA.
I did want to pass along some suggestions/advice. Think of your grade here as an opportunity to improve your skills at learning. Some of what you need to do is specific to language learning, but a lot of it generalizes. For example “spaced repetition” is a key to learning just about anything effectively. And these days there are free software programs that help you implement it. Memrise is a great tool for first learning, Anki is a way to help ensure it stays remembered. These tools can help you learn vocabulary, conjugations, example sentences, etc. A key is to prepare your own decks to study rather than loading one from someone else; it just seems to work out better that way.
As a starting point, read thru some articles about how people learn languages such as http://www.zompist.com/whylang.html There are entire forums online of people learning languages on their own, you can get some tips by reading about what other people are trying.
So what else? So far you’ll be getting to work on distributed practice, something you should be doing with every subject. And you’ll be building time management skills, as you set up this practice. Another key is to explain things to yourself in ways that make sense to you. I remember from my days learning Spanish that the grammar rules not only are arbitrary but are presented in a difficult manner. And tests are graded on this minutia; are the conjugations exactly correct, are the pronouns in the right order, did you use the correct article? Your local library probably has copies of the Michel Thomas series on French. While you are well beyond the vocabulary and grammar he presents I think it would be worth listening to the 12 hours or so of instruction to hear how he approaches learning the grammar because you can then start inventing similar rules for the topics you are studying. Here is an example: in the Paul Noble course (similar to Thomas but harder to find in a library) he talks about how one would say “we have prepared it”. The obvious way would be “nous avon le préparé” but the correct sentence is “nous l’avons préparé”. Instead of a complicated grammar rule he simply introduces the “have-stealing rule”; have steals the article.
Thanks everyone! Sorry this response it late but I decided to stick with French IV. Thanks again.