Colleges with Foreign Language Requirements

Anniushka
Sat, 23 Jun 2007 12:29:06 +0000

I guess I’m basing my “mid/low-600s isn’t all that good” opinion on two things:

1) It’s Stanford, for Pete’s sake. Nobody would apply to Stanford thinking “Oh, a 620 is a perfectly fine SAT score to submit.” Everyone on CC, at least, would be scrambling to retake. A 620-640 is a fairly low (bottom quartile) score for Stanford or any of those top schools, as far as admissions are concerned.

2) I had studied French for less than a year when I took the SAT II French test and scored 770. It just wasn’t that demanding. Now, I know that “had studied French for less than a year” isn’t the whole story–after all, it’s my story, so I should know–but it still says something. It takes time for a language to sink in. I was able to score high before the language had fully sunk in. If that’s what I did and got a 770, then I imagine that someone scoring a 620 or 640 would not have to have a very durable understanding of the language and might, in fact, be fairly unproficient by the time they get to Stanford, and certainly by the time they graduate, if they did no language study during their years there.

At the end of 11th grade I got a score like 620 on the SAT II Chemistry test; I have virtually no understanding or knowledge of chemistry anymore (one year later), and had relatively little understanding when I took the test. I know full well that I can’t necessarily apply this to other SAT II tests, but it does somewhat affect my perception of a low/mid-600 score.