UVA successful admit without taking world language all the way through?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What is your child has a FL exemption due to dyslexia? My DC is only in middle school now but I’m wondering if colleges will still hold it against her for not taking FL.

Maybe she can take ASL. UVA considers ASL a foreign language (and it is one of the languages you can use to fulfill the CAS FL requirement—which is 2 years in college but many test out of all or part).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What is your child has a FL exemption due to dyslexia? My DC is only in middle school now but I’m wondering if colleges will still hold it against her for not taking FL.

Our daughter didn’t take foreign language beyond level 3 for a similar reason. If a school can’t understand the reasoning behind that, it probably isn’t the right school for kids with learning related disabilities.

Did you explain this in the app?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What is your child has a FL exemption due to dyslexia? My DC is only in middle school now but I’m wondering if colleges will still hold it against her for not taking FL.

My DD has ADHD and they type she has makes it very difficult to learn languages. Her college counselor was basically like - too bad. Frustrating. Her only bad grades are in Spanish.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What is your child has a FL exemption due to dyslexia? My DC is only in middle school now but I’m wondering if colleges will still hold it against her for not taking FL.

Our daughter didn’t take foreign language beyond level 3 for a similar reason. If a school can’t understand the reasoning behind that, it probably isn’t the right school for kids with learning related disabilities.

+1

[Anonymous]

I think it's less important to focus on the idea of 4 years in HS and more important to focus on the level the student reaches. My OOS DC got in this cycle having taken AP Span Lang in 11th grade and stopping after that. Very, very few kids take AP Spanish Lit.

I believe that Dean J has said many times that what they ideally want to see is that kids have taken a capstone class-- AP/IB or whatever the school offers -- for each core subject, but most important is the rigor in the context of each school. There isn't even a second AP French class offered, so kids taking French on an advanced track wouldn't have a class to take senior year.

So the issue is less whether a kid MUST take 4 years in HS (the answer seems to be clearly no) and more whether they have taken a highly/most rigorous set of classes offered by the school in all subjects. Undoubtedly, there will be kids accepted who stopped foreign language in 10th grade, well short of AP level, and get in, but that choice diminishes their chances and likely would require some countervailing strength in their application.

[Anonymous]

BTW, Dean J has regular IG sessions (weekly for long periods of the year) in which she takes questions about all aspects of the admissions process. They are interesting to listen to, and anyone with a specific question would probably benefit from posing it to her directly in that forum. My bet is that they would not expect students with dyslexia to take a world language throughout HS, but why not just ask her?

[Anonymous]

For any college admissions "rule", there always will be a few exceptions -- based on the totality of the applicant's profile. In the era of the Common App, easy to apply to one more college.

Aside: not certain, but I believe UVa Arts & Sciences will require that a modern foreign language be taken in college. Some other parts of UVa do not insist on this.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don’t know the answer but I think it’s so dumb colleges do this. My son is dropping Spanish after spamish 4 so he can take double AP sciences. I took 8 years of Spanish and I would say I am proficient but not fluent. One thing I’ve learned traveling through Latin America is that Americans (US) are learning jack-sh&t in their HS Spanish courses. I hear them with their awful accents and bad syntax. And people are constantly complimenting my Spanish with genuine surprise in their voices, asking me where I learned to speak such good Spanish. So I have concluded that forcing lots of kids to take four years of Spanish IN HS does not result in any actual useful skill set. (And in fact, they learn more Spanish if they take 4 years from ages 11-16 rather than ages 14-18, since the earlier you learn it, the better your ear is.).

Taking four years of science and never taking it again doesn’t result in any “actual useful skill set.”

Taking four years of math doesn’t make one fluent in mathematics, especially higher-level math of which you barely scratch the surface.

Only with FL do people seem to expect to emerge from the other end completely fluent. Yet in no other area is this level of mastery achieved at the end of high school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:For any college admissions "rule", there always will be a few exceptions -- based on the totality of the applicant's profile. In the era of the Common App, easy to apply to one more college.

Aside: not certain, but I believe UVa Arts & Sciences will require that a modern foreign language be taken in college. Some other parts of UVa do not insist on this.

Yes. 4 semesters but you can place out of some or all.