BTW, if anyone is planning to apply to UMich, they’re supplemental questions are up. I believe they are the same as last year, but are updated to refer to 2016-17 season.
Welcome to the craziness @what???!! Catching up on the thread:
@eandesmom So sorry to hear about your son! Hope he heals quickly. Is there anyway he can get an accommodation for the test?
Our oldest was involved in Take All My Dough (TKD) for over a decade, ending with a 3rd degree black belt. She competed internationally in the Why That’s Fabulous Kukkiwon format. We joked that the World Taekwondo Federal was an apt acronym as we often muttered those three letters. I miss the camaraderie of the other parents but not the endless tournaments and the expense.
Spykid is taking three SAT subject tests: Math 2, USH, and Lit. He’s forgotten a ton of the lower math so he’s had to go back and study. Not a math lover, so I’m not super optimistic.
I can’t remember who originally posted about their d being intimidated by the college search @MotherOfDragons perhaps? I suspect you’re on target here. The whole process can be overwhelming. What we told our oldest and now Spykid is that nothing is in concrete. If the chosen school isn’t working out, then transfer. Don’t like your major? Switch. This helped ease a lot of the stress and the worry that they’re making the wrong decision.
A pox on the college board. These score release delays are infuriating.
@2muchquan I would consider your daughter to be proficient since she’s been studying since 1st grade and can get by in Beijing in the language. I would definitely put that down.
This brings up a related question that I’ve been meaning to ask:
QOTD2 - For schools that require you to apply for direct entry to a major, if your kid wants to double for sure: 1) Can they apply for both majors; 2) If not, what’s the strategy for choosing the first major? Should they seek direct entry into the more selective of the two majors or the less selective major?
Here’s what prompts my question: D’s primary major will be accounting, but she will double in Arabic. The b-schools or accounting schools are very selective pretty much everywhere. So I think she should apply directly to those schools. But I also want her to be able to indicate her interest in Arabic as many schools are interested in admitting and financially supporting (i.e., scholarships) academically strong students that are interested in less popular majors.
Also, on the recommendation of another parent on this thread, I ordered the “A Review of Fifth Public University Honors Prograrms” book from Amazon. It will take me awhile to get through it, but for the schools that it reviews, although the statistical information is a little dated, it’s a great resource. I also wish a few more schools were included, however, as I noticed some we are interested in are missing. In any event, I recommend it for those who are considering public honors programs. And it was pretty cheap.
@itsgettingreal17 This would be my strategy. One can always move “down” to an easier major or make a lateral move but for sure go for the more selective. I think it’s important to determine if double majoring is indeed a possibility. Are the classes impacted? Do required core classes take up too much of the schedule?
@itsgettingreal17, I see your dilemma above but not sure of the best strategy. Arabic major would be very helpful for scholarships and admission. However, if the b-school is hard to get in, it might also be hard to transfer in afterwards. Perhaps your D could apply to the more selective major and indicate on the application her plan to double major and highlight her Arabic language EC’s.
@2muchquan, I haven’t looked at the common application. How does it ask for language proficiency? Is it just “how many languages the student is proficient in” but no indication of the level of proficiency?
@itsgettingreal17, key is finding out if the interested majors are impacted ones are not at the particular school. I heard it is very difficult at some schools to transfer into impacted majors.
QOTD1 - My S will probably put 3 languages, English, Spanish (learning from 1st grade) and our native language (he can speak well, read and write with decent accuracy @ very slow pace 
)
@Mom2aphysicsgeek, The CB always puts anticipated for the upcoming year of test dates. They always seen to follow their anticipated schedule.
@itsgettingreal17, your D is in a different situation potential major-wise. I would contact admissions directly for her top choice schools and talk to them. It isn’t like my S who wants to do CS and Math as a double, which is pretty easy compared to business and Arabic…
whoa, the thread is moving fast.
@CT1417 This is not new news, but yes, the purpose of the above post was to rant again against CB. ~X(
I noticed the delay of the score release in February when they posted tiny “mid-June” as May score release.
I think they put out the June 15th date around May.
Many people were still blindsided though.
@Mom2aphysicsgeek I don’t think there ever was a September SAT test in recent years. In the past though, the October test still worked out as it did NOT take 6 weeks to get the scores. :-L
The dates are Anticipated because we cannot register yet, but they do not change the dates when they open them in summer.
S19 will benefit from August 26, 2017 testing. It is on my google calendar :))
They removed January testing and added August testing instead.
https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/register/dates-deadlines
@itsgettingreal17 I would contact the depts and ask. Also, are there any scholarships associated with one over the other? For example, at Bama if a students wants to double, naming engineering as their major when entering means $2500, whereas naming the other means they don’t get it.
@STEM2017 That was probably a smart thing to do.
Between 4 AP classes/tests, 2 ACTs, 1 SAT, 3 SAT subject tests, some state testings, S17 ended the term with 2 Bs and 1 C, the lowest GPA ever. :((
@payn4ward - Sorry to hear about the lower grades. This semester/term is the toughest for most juniors, with lot of competitions (ECs) plus AP/IB/SAT/SAT II testing. My DS took ACT in September to avoid the conflicts and impact on school and taking SAT II this Saturday (after finals are over). Also, he ended up taking one AP and one IB only due to conflicts.
Agree that there has not been an August SAT date, at least for the past several years. I always thought the ACT was clever to offer an early September date, so as to capture those who wished to study during the summer. Both of my boys took the October SAT, but school and EC life had become so busy by October that it was difficult to carve out the time for practice exams on the weekends leading up to the SAT.
@payn4ward – I join you in your rant. I doubt that my son would have sat for the USH SAT II again this Saturday, as several of the schools on his list require submitting all test scores, but now that option has been eliminated.
The only reason he took the USH is that he thought one school mentioned wanting a humanities SAT II.
Oooh, I’m a linguist, so this is always a fun one! (And, after having written the rest of this, one I have a lot to say about. Sorry, folks, but this is both a personal and a professional passion. So it goes. Fun item in the last paragraph, though, if you’d rather skip to the end.)
As a linguist, you often get asked—mainly, I think, due to the military’s appropriation of the term long after the discipline of linguistics already existed—how many languages you know. Well, of course, it always depends on what it means to “know a language”. (You can skip the next paragraph, unless you want to know what passes for snark from a linguist, in which case I suggest you proceed with caution.)
If I’m feeling snarky, I give an answer like, “Well, I’m a native speaker of Southern American English, but I use a much more Standardized North American English variety in my professional and even personal life now. Also, I had a lot of input from Pennsilfaanisch (a.k.a. Pennsylvania Dutch) when I was growing up and can hold a conversation in it and can read (but not write) it, but I don’t know if I’d say I really ‘know’ it the way I know European German—not Swiss German, that really should be called its own separate language!—and I have a pretty high degree of fluency in German, even to the point that I have a bit of an identifiable Alemannic accent when I speak it, but I’m certainly not a native speaker. Also, I’ve taken coursework in the North Germanic languages and so can struggle through reading basic Swedish, Danish (though I’m not as good at that one), and both Norwegians (Bokmål and Nynorsk, but I’m better at the latter), but unfortunately I can’t manage at all in Icelandic. I’ve never had any background at all in Dutch, but I have had the experience of holding a conversation with someone who could speak Dutch and English but not German, with me speaking German while he didn’t know I also spoke English—so he spoke Dutch and I spoke German and we managed to communicate pretty well, so I don’t know what you’d call that. Also, I have enough background in Latin and Italian, though many years ago, that I can read (but not speak) Italian and to a lesser extent Romanian and Spanish, though more at a kids-book level than anything serious. (I can read Italian with good enough pronunciation that I’ve fooled Italian waiters into thinking I can actually speak Italian, though. That’s awkward.) And finally, I used to be able to hold a conversation in Hungarian, but that was 25ish years ago and has completely atrophied, though there’s probably some bits of it back there in deep memory that I could revive given enough attention.”
Eventually people glaze over or collapse from exhaustion, and so I know I’ve made my point.
As for my oldest, she’s already satisfied the requirements to get the [ACTFL’s seal of biliteracy](http://sealofbiliteracy.org/) on her diploma, except that she still has to pass her fourth year of English, so I feel pretty confident in saying she’s proficient in Spanish and English. (She was surprised to have passed the Spanish exam during her junior year. It didn’t surprise me, though—she’s good at it.) My 15-year-old is going to be another matter. She doesn’t have her older sister’s natural gift for languages, and so even if she takes Spanish to the same course level as her sister, she almost certainly won’t achieve the same level.
(Of course, she’s intent on teaching herself Middle English in her spare time. I wonder what they’d think of someone who put Modern and Middle English down separately?)
I don’t think it’s asking for an ACTFL biliteracy proficiency, though—I think it’s asking for something more like whether you have a reading level such that you can make it through a short story (and, for English, an Ernest Hemingway or Stephen Crane short story, not a James Joyce or William Faulkner short story!), and/or spoken proficiency such that you can make small talk at a basic level about the weather and what’s going on in town with a shopkeeper without resorting to hand gestures and overly much fumbling for words or syntactic structures.
Really, I suspect passing any high school’s [language name] III course should cover what it’s after, or hanging around speakers of that language (or self-studying) such that you get to that point in speaking and/or writing.
And finally, an interesting datapoint: It’s such a cultural given that Americans don’t “do” foreign languages that it turns out Americans are notoriously bad at rating their own proficiency—those of us who actually have some non-English proficiency tend to believe we’re worse at it than we really are. Go figure.
@4beardolls D has not yet created a CA login, so I’m working off some screenshots I’ve seen in a CA tutorial:
https://cdn2.hubspot.net/hub/146790/file-3566764831-png/images/2015_new_common_app_4.png
Is Klingon an option? 
My son is also on the list of those taking SAT subject tests this weekend, and is planning to take Math 2 and Physics. One of his schools wants three, and he got a 690 on chemistry as a freshman. I have encouraged him to also take Lit on Saturday, but I think he is just going to stick with 2 tests and send the chemistry score as his third even though it is a lower percentile. He is just so over standardized testing!
QOTD: He is only proficient in English, so we have nothing to worry about there. Studying for AP Mandarin sounds like it is enough to claim some proficiency to me.
@dfbdfb Very interesting! I guess D is “proficient” in Spanish, by that definition. She will be spending a lot of her free time this summer watching Spanish telenovelas (with Spanish subtitles) to improve and will minor in Spanish in college.