<p>My college didn’t let me place out of chemistry or biology or calculus, even though I had 5’s in all of them. There was some overlap with my high school courses, but halfway through, we were into new material. Helped me some initially, because I was working 30 hours a week and playing a sport…plus I really knew the material well for the next classes in the sequence. I can’t say that I would have jumped right into the higher-level courses as a freshman, even had I been able to. Might have been overwhelming with all the other commitments I had.</p>
<p>
a) They will look at the sort of courses you generally take, but they won’t give a damn whether or not the class has the word “heritage” in it. They ABSOLUTELY care about your GPA.
b) You completely invented the thing about taking four years of the language, someone could take the heritage class and then stop or vice versa.</p>
<p>Of course, this isn’t even about skill, placement is apparently determined by ethnicity.</p>
<p>
That is the difference between a 3.9 and a 4.0. If you don’t mind getting B’s, you’d probably get more enjoyment by just skipping class and not studying for finals. And once again, med schools care about GPA very much, because it makes it easy to compare applicants and is used to calculate med school rankings.</p>
<p>“Placement is apparently determined by ethnicity.”</p>
<p>I said it before, the ACLU would be on the college’s ass already if that were true, we would see it on the news. No college would make such a bold placement rule, the OP is omitting details in his frustration. He can clear that up by copying and pasting a link to the rule, though.</p>
<p>And people’s unhealthy interests in the differences between a 3.9 and 4.0 GPA is what started this ridiculous debate. That’s not the point here. If you really want to get into Med School, anyway, take a science class that will make you more marketable to them and get an A in it! That’s easy, right, since the only way to get B’s is to skip class and not study for finals…</p>
<p>
OP is in Canada. It’s about where your parents are from, unless I am misinterpreting what the OP said. The class is all Asians, that is clear.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You said that getting a B doesn’t matter. If it doesn’t matter, why try to get an A?</p>
<p>This whole thread is ■■■■■■■■. My IQ just dropped.</p>
<p>Wouldn’t it be boring as hell to sit in a classroom saying “Ni hao” to a bunch of kids being exposed to a tonal language for the first time?</p>
<p>Ancient Greek is also tonal. So are many African languages. Should classical students of ancient Greek get placed into heritage Chinese too?</p>
<p>Also the Chinese languages (Hakka, Hokkien, Min-nan, Cantonese, Wu, etc.) which are often wrongly called “dialects” are quite different of Mandarin. Think of the difference between German and English. That’s how far the Chinese languages tend to be apart on average. Why should you get placed in a heritage German class because you speak English?</p>
<p>You changed your argument completely (not to mention took lunar_years’ way out of context). You went from supporting a native Chinese speaker’s right to an easy A to the injustice of placing students in a class that they’re not ready for. </p>
<p>Of course the latter is wrong, but AGAIN, the Chinese Department would understand your point even better than we do. And I feel they have more than a little say in this policy (which OP could expand on if he’s still feeling wronged).</p>
<p>I think the OP has a right to take an easy course. If he has the advantage of already knowing Chinese then it’s his right to take the class and get an A in it. He might be bored but people take classes all the time just to get the A. As long as the class does not curve then I think it’s completely fine. Also, I agree with the part about the placement tests - those should be in place as well.</p>
<p>■■■■!! Just take the F<strong><em>ing class and stop b</em></strong><em>ing about it~!!! If its that much of a f-ing problem just switch languages! As I said, if your a GOOD student, you will get good grades! This whole thread is ridiculous! I got put into a more advanced language class that was VERY DIFFERENT from my original language (the only thing that matched up for me was vocab, and that was barely anything! (Haitian Kreyol put into an advanced French class))! Stop b</em>***ing! You DTM right now and its not cute! And to everyone else, its all about morals; if this lowlife doesn’t VALUE his/her education, thats his/her problem. Let them fail epikly in life and always take the easy way out! Unbelievable. I would think that college students would be passed all this nonesense, but aparently not…</p>
<p>Better example:</p>
<p>Say you go to study in China, and you take a class that would be equivalent to Chinese 101, but IN ENGLISH. You’ve been speaking English for AT LEAST a good 13 years, and you should imo have pretty good grasp of the language. Would you think it would be right for you take this English class with all the Chinese kids who didn’t have such a chance to learn the language as a child? No. There. I answered it for you. That would be like massacaring a village with no army/military support.</p>
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</p>
<p>you are ■■■■■■■■… right?</p>
<p>Evidence that placement is determined by ethnicity rather than “skill”: </p>
<p>By " heritage students " , we refer to :</p>
<p>•Students who were born in a non-Chinese speaking country, but was raised in a home where Mandarin or another Chinese dialect was spoken, who speaks or merely understands the dialect, and who is to some degree bilingual in English and Chinese.
•Students who were born in a Chinese speaking country whose first language was Chinese, and who have received some, but incomplete formal education in that country up to 8th grade.</p>
<p>[Basic</a> Chinese Course Description (Heritage)](<a href=“http://www2.asia.ubc.ca/faculty/li/department/course_description/CHINESE_100_COURSE_DESCRIPTION.htm]Basic”>http://www2.asia.ubc.ca/faculty/li/department/course_description/CHINESE_100_COURSE_DESCRIPTION.htm) </p>
<p>Someone who “speaks” or “merely understands the dialect”</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.washington.edu/students/crscat/chinese.html[/url]”>http://www.washington.edu/students/crscat/chinese.html</a> Non-heritage “Open only to students who do not have any previous training in Chinese”</p>
<p><a href=“Front Page | Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies”>Front Page | Department of Asian & Middle Eastern Studies;
<p>CHN 001 Elementary Chinese (first half, offered in fall semester only)</p>
<p>This course is for students with no or minimal proficiency in Chinese. The course focuses on: </p>
<p>developing oral and aural proficiency and survival communication;
mastery of the Chinese writing system for rudimentary reading and writing;
foundational grammar for simple sentence and short paragraph building.
Student Profile: </p>
<p>Students who have never studied Chinese
Students who were born in the non-Chinese speaking countries and have studied some Chinese in a community or Sunday school for less than two years
Students of Chinese descent who speak a Chinese dialect other than Mandarin to family members or who have never or rarely spoken Chinese to family members
Students who have studied Chinese 1-2 years in high school in non-Chinese speaking country </p>
<p>I’m not these 3 universities are not alone in their practices.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You can be white, black, almost anything and fit this description. While it certainly leans towards the Chinese, if you’re some white kid who was raised by former longtime China expats in Miami, you might grow up understanding Chinese.</p>
<p>Or, the child who had those parents who try to force their kid to learn every language when the child is two months old, would probably fit in here as well.</p>
<p>
Again, you don’t have to be Asian to be born in a Chinese-speaking country. When I was at Plattsburgh, and did foreign exchange assignments, I was assigned to a black girl, born and raised in Japan and knew nothing outside of Japanese culture.</p>
<p>I assume they make this distinction because, while these courses are more advanced, it makes sense. It’s like someone who knows English, may or may not be fluent in it – but knows enough, being required to take the most basic English course to re-learn the alphabet.
They’ve probably been there, done that, and it’s not going to improve their English proficiency to learn something they already know—which defeats the purpose of college.</p>
<p>That said, I don’t agree with requiring a student to take these “heritage” classes instead of the standard Chinese class. It should be an available option should the student decide the “non-heritage” is too simple for them.</p>
<p>What they’re (attempting) to do is assume a student’s skill level, so it’s still based on skill, despite whether their assumption is correct.</p>
<p>It says you have to speak or understand the dialect, which is the opposite of it being determined by ethnicity or race. And all this because you want to be able to take a class in which you’ll get a guaranteed A. Shame on you.</p>
<p>My school offers Russian, Chinese, etc. for native speakers who want to improve their vocabulary and learn to read and write. The reason such courses don’t exist in Spanish, for example, is that you need to be fluent in English to attend Yale, and English and Spanish use the (basically) same alphabet. So it’s pretty reasonable to assume that someone who is a native Spanish speaker and attends Yale will already read and write, and thus take the same placement tests as everyone else and place into higher level classes.</p>
<p>Native Chinese and Russian speakers, on the other hand, have to deal with very different alphabets. Many who grew up speaking the languages never learned how to read/write, and thus are in a bit of a pickle regarding classes – it’s not fair to be in lower-level classes with kids who are learning to speak and understand as well as read and write, but it’s also not fair to force them into higher level classes when they’re still learning the alphabet! So, they offer “heritage” classes so that kids who can already SPEAK can learn to read/write the language. It’s not racism, it’s just an answer to the problem posed by kids who can speak but not read a language.</p>
<p>Yeah, the only thing close to “evidence” that that rule is based on ethnicity rather than skill is the line preceding it written by you saying just that, which isn’t evidence at all.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>A language, whose spoken component is paramount and can be spontaneously creolised, is separate from a writing system, which is inorganic, artificial and something which must be invented. </p>
<p>Chinese can be written using hanyu pinyin or hanzi, or even [url=<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao’erjing]xiao’erjing[/url">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao’erjing]xiao’erjing[/url</a>] (Chinese written in Arabic). The last one has a particularly rich cultural history because of the Silk Road.</p>
<p>Btw, Cyrillic is not very different from the Latin alphabet. They are both based on Phoenician script and so are very close cousins. In fact, Cyrillic is based on the Greek alphabet, and schoolchildren pick the latter up easily (at least in science).</p>
<p>I particularly liked the physical reductionism pulled by galoisien on purdue in the beginning of the thread. ‘Hard work’ is measured by joules output by the brain, it’s all physics! What’s next, morality is just an illusion?</p>
<p>Just wanted to tag some classic galoisien sophistry.</p>