If two students have identical stats... but..

Quesce
Sat, 19 Aug 2006 09:56:52 +0000

Tony I’ve come across this argument before, but I think we have to look at things in perspective. English exams tend to be more difficult even for native speakers because the level of difficulty is increased. I’m not sure whether you’ve noticed this or not, but if you were to take the SAT II for English, that equivalent would probably be the Literature subject test. It’s a pretty comprehensive and in-depth type of exercise that would be many times more demanding than, say, the French SAT II. For that reason, it is much easier for a Chinese native speaker to have an 800 on the Chinese test than it is for a native English speaker to have an 800 on the English test.

The foreign languages test proficiency, whilst the English language tests look for higher levels of thinking, going beyond just being able to communicate with the language. I am very sure the French tests won’t ask you difficult french vocabulary (difficult relative to a native french speaker, since we are comparing the english exam with a native english speaker as well) nor will it ever ask many of the questions that you will see on the AP English or SAT II Lit exams (vs. AP French & SAT II French).

*Note: I used French here as an example. I’m sure this applies to Spanish and all other languages respectively.