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.

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.).