<p>swim2- the AP french exam has not been updated in years (unlike the SP and GRM exams), it is miserably difficult for fifth year students. I would know!</p>
<p>my school allows you to take it after 3 or 4 years, but the exam IS extremely difficult and I believe that 5s are rather rare. That’s not to say you can’t get a 5, but I’ve heard that you need to be basically fluent in the language. It is stupid to say that the highest you will get is a 2, though, because it completely depends on 1)the quality of your fl education 2)whether you are good at/like learning languages and 3)how much work you are willing to put in.</p>
<p>Our school has the Language exam for juniors and the Literature exam for seniors in Spanish, but only Language for both juniors and seniors in French. Scores on the French are much higher than on the Spanish, mainly because of differences in teacher quality. (Our Spanish Literature teacher is not good, although she was in the past. The Language teachers are reasonable, but most still get owned on the test anyway, thanks to the curves and inflation caused by a large influx of those who are fluent. I think the same problem will eventually plague the AP Chinese test as well.)</p>
<p>Teachers are almost always wrong about these things because they try to mold everyone into the same student.</p>
<p>Many people probably would fail Spanish, because it’s difficult and learning the language is much harder than getting an A in 3/4 years of Spanish, so of course no one can do it goes the arguement in their minds.</p>
<p>At my school I think barely any non natives get a 4 or 5 in Spanish and no one ever has in French, though few take it</p>
<p>At my school. It’s Spanish/French 1 and II. Honors Spanish/French III, IV. Then Spanish/French V.</p>
<p>So basically you have to start the language at 8th grade to get to any AP in senior year.</p>
<p>i took spanish 1 & 2 in middle school, so i took spanish 3 in 9th grade and AP spanish in 10th. for most normal students at our highschool though (people who weren’t offered spanish in middle school), it’s mostly juniors that take AP spanish. they go from spanish 3 to AP spanish or they jump from spanish 2 to AP spanish if they think they can handle it. i think it was because we had an easy teacher, though.</p>
<p>our spanish teacher made it seem like the AP exam was IMPOSSIBLE. she would lecture us about how “even college students will have trouble with this.” but when the AP exam came around, it wasn’t as bad as she made it seem, and she even admitted that. but yea, i think it’s ridiculous they’re taking it out of your school. 
really sucks that your teacher is doubting everyone. you should emphasize that there are students who are WILLING to put in the time & effort to make it that far. seriously, idk why she thinks it’s so impossible. it’s dumb.</p>
<p>Teachers love the reverse psychology with all the AP exams…some say its really easy to try to prevent kids from giving up, some say its really hard so the superstar studyers add on an extra hour a day the month before the exam</p>
<p>at exeter (renown and extremely competitive prep school), which has a trimester system, students do 6 trimesters and then take the adanced sequence, which is 2 trimesters, and then for their 9th, they take either ap lang or ap lit, and then the test. but this is arguably the best and most competitive secondary school in the world, and they follow a college/post-college pace in many classes, esp. languages and math.</p>
<p>it sounds like your teacher realizes that your schools spanish program is simply not rigorous enough for you or at least the general school population to do well enough to merit an AP class that will lead students down the road to failure.</p>
<p>i took Spanish 4 AP as a sophomore non-native speaker but thats only because our school has a really strong spanish program. I got a 3 which isn’t too bad but I’d agree that the test is quite difficult for non-native speakers.</p>
<p>i took the french exam and it was really hard. I got a 1 or a 2. Im a junior in french 4. your teacher could be right. my whole class probally got 2s</p>
<p>At my school, the only AP language offered is AP Latin, but you can take it after 2 years of regular. Granted, we have the best teacher in the state, but the class isn’t all that difficult if the teacher sticks to the curriculum. I don’t know about French or Spanish, but they can’t be impossible. Why else would the CB have the class?</p>
<p>My school doesnt even offer the AP Spanish, we just started spanish IV for next year</p>
<p>too lazy to read this whole thread, but here’s an idea if nobody’s mentioned it yet:</p>
<p>if you think you’re capable, just buy a textbook self-study AP spanish! :)</p>
<p>my school offers both AP Spanish and AP French in language and literature </p>
<p>however we have to complete the language course in order to do the literature one. most students will take language in 11th and literature in 12th. but there are other students who will wait to take language in 12th.</p>
<p>at my school it basically depends when you start taking a foreign language class. after completeing 2 years of spanish i can move on to ap language. however some students who are exceptionally well in that subject will take an ap after 1 year of studying spanish.</p>
<p>ill be self-studying for both ap spanish language and literature. but i am a native speaker and it shouldnt be that difficult. everyone i know has passed it with a 5.</p>
<p>we dont have any ap languages at our school… at least i dont think so. no one has ever been able to take it because they require the 4 years then ap… but freshmen start off in language 1 making it impossible to take an ap language class</p>
<p>In order to get to AP Spanish you have to either not retake spanish 1 as a freshmen ( we learn in it 7th and 8th grade ) or double (block sched.) .</p>
<p>For me:
7th- Spanish 1A
8th- Spanish 1B
9th- Spanish 2 Honors
10th- Spanish 3 Honors
11th- Spanish 4 Honors
12th- Spanish AP</p>
<p>Oh and French only goes up to 4. And about 80 percent of the kids in my school stop after spanish 2 as thats the requirement.</p>
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<p>I strongly discourage that unless you know somebody that you can speak it with. Yes you can learn the grammer and vocab and all that but speaking is part of it too.</p>
<p>We have AP as 5th year for French and Spanish. We have a semester block schedule. There are no foreign language classes before 9th grade (a HUGE mistake, in my opinion). </p>
<p>Both programs are declining due to decreasing interest in French and the administration’s failure to support AP Spanish. There has actually never been an actual AP Spanish class; it has always been something that kids have to do as independent study. My mother, one of the Spanish teachers (so I know all about this, because she never stops talking about it), devotes many hours of her (unpaid) after-school time, weekends, and vacations to teach the students who are dedicated enough to learn higher-level Spanish. This technically–according to the AP audit–can’t count as a real AP class; but there has never been enough student interest to have a real AP class. Even this year, when something like 12 or 14 kids (really good kids–ASB president, future valedictorians, kids who have their hearts set on top-tier colleges) wanted to sign up for AP Spanish, the administration said “No–that’s not enough for a real class section!”–despite the fact that AP physics ran with 15 students, my AP Literature class last year had only 14, and WASL (WA state standardized test) prep classes run with as few as 5 (!) students. The administration suggested putting these 12-14 AP Spanish students in with a first-year class. I have no idea, no idea at all, why or how they think this would work, but that’s all they could come up with. AP French is combined in a class with 3rd and 4th year students, and even that doesn’t work. At all. We didn’t start looking at AP material (practicing actual test questions, etc.) until the week before the exam. (And then it was the teacher saying to us, “Okay, vous quatre. Here’s some picture sequences. Figure out what to do while I teach the rest of the class.”) Thank goodness I had taken it upon myself to start preparing earlier than that!</p>
<p>I took both AP French and AP Spanish–Spanish in 10th grade, French this year. </p>
<p>It’s simply untrue that “only” native speakers get 5s on AP language exams. Two years ago three people (including myself) took the AP Spanish exam; one was a native speaker, two were non-native (but well-traveled and well-prepared). The native speaker got a 3, the two non-native speakers got 5s. Last year one person–a very non-native speaker (not even from a family that travels to Latin America, etc.)–took AP Spanish and got a 4. My school has never had a native Spanish speaker get a 5. One who really studied for the exam got a 4, but that’s it. </p>
<p>As for French, there’s only one person who I know of who has gotten a 5 (so far), and he was a non-native French speaker. I don’t think any native French speakers have taken the test at my school; the French program is very small here. I took the test this year after a little under two years of studying French (!) and I feel pretty confident that I got a 5. </p>
<p>Yes, AP foreign language is difficult. It corresponds to third year college level, rather than just freshman/introductory level as in English, calculus, physics, biology, etc. I think it simply takes a highly intelligent, well-prepared student to get a 5 on AP language exams. It seems to me like a pretty ****poor excuse to just say, “Well, you have to be a native speaker to get a 5 anyway…” </p>
<p>BECAUSE IT’S NOT TRUE. That’s all.</p>
<p>although you’re right that you don’t need to be a native speaker to get a 5, i do think you have to be more or less fluent to get a 5, at least, on the language exam. It’s not because of the speaking section which is not very hard but the reading section requires a vast understanding of the language if you want to get in the 5 range.</p>
<p>You don’t have to go to class for language exam… just learn it by yourself. I think most of my spanish learning happened outside the classroom.</p>