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

[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.