<p>If I’m a native Chinese speaker, have studied Japanese for 5 years, and got a 3 on the AP exam, about what score would I get on the SAT Japanese test?</p>
<p>I’d guess that that’d result in a score of around 570-620; I don’t know of any official conversion tables (this is probably because, considering that APs cover many subjects that SAT Subject Tests don’t and vice versa, no tables have been created). BUT, there are numerous caveats of such a score estimate, ones that render it largely useless.</p>
<p>-The SAT Subject Test is a lot shorter. You may be less likely to be worn out because there is no sheer duration to do the wearing down.
-The material on the SAT Subject Test generally comes in shorter bites.
-The SAT Subject Test quizzes you on grammar, while the AP expects you to know it from the get-go. This can be both a pro and a con, since having a good hold on what sounds right will win you points on the SAT Subject Test but is also just another thing to be graded down for.
-The AP uses kanji more often, but the SAT Subject Test tends to use marginally more difficult and rarer kanji. Being a native Chinese speaker may help you out a little on the SAT Subject Test by allowing you to decipher meanings even if you don’t know the pronunciations, but don’t bank on it.
-If, for some reason, you forget to bring a CD player, you’re screwed. The AP has no such requirement.
-The AP requires examinees to write original Japanese text and speak in Japanese. Each of these can be either a pro or a con, depending on your strengths and weaknesses. I’m bad at speaking (or at least I was when I took the AP) but good at writing. No such skills will be required on the SAT Subject Test, though it can be argued that preparing by speaking and writing in Japanese will help you with your listening and reading, respectively.
-The AP is in the past and represents the knowledge you had at that point (well, it crudely represents it, anyway). The SAT Subject Test is in the future (in November, to be specific) and you still have a lot of time to improve.</p>
<p>In short, the exams are too different for anyone to be able to accurately convert from one to the other.</p>
<p>I only got a 2 on the AP (though, in all fairness, I barely studied for it, was only in my third year of Japanese, had never been to Japan, and am non-native) but I’m shooting for a 750 or higher. It’ll be a lot of work, but I think I can do it! You can too, and it sounds like your chances are better than mine, however difficult it may be to estimate either of ours.</p>
<p>Hey thanks for writing out such a great, detailed explanation ^^</p>
<p>I thought they give you both romaji and hiragana during the reading sections though? Even if there are difficult kanji? Also, compared to the AP test, how fast is the listening? I’m the same as you, bad at speaking/listening, good at writing :/</p>
<p>To be clear, I haven’t taken the actual SAT Subject Test yet, only a couple of practice tests. From what I’ve seen, the sentence-completion part has furigana (and, of course, romaji) but the reading part does not (Ironically, on my more recent practice test I did better on the section with no furigana or romaji). The AP test listening has faster-speaking people who tend to use less common and standard vocabulary and sentence structures (i.e. more realistic speakers) but the SAT Subject Test listening occurs in longer bursts, and its questions rely proportionally more on context than on explicitly stated information (e.g. politeness levels; subtlety). Actually, now that I think about it, the latter point is true of the SAT Subject Test reading as well.</p>
<p>I think I’m actually going to go with SAT Chinese, if it’s possible, because I really don’t think I’ll do that well on Japanese xD Thanks so much though!</p>