Placement Tests

Bard's Language Center, upon faculty request, provides students with access to language placement exams. These exams are designed to accurately and efficiently place students in the first two years of college language courses. Upon completion, students are able to see their score and the complete results online. Students studying languages not listed below should contact their professor directly to learn about placement evaluation.

In-House Language Placement Test

For access to these placement tests, please contact Stephanie Kufner via email below.
[email protected]

WebCAPE
The WebCAPE test evaluates reading and grammar skills, while the TrueNorth test is an exciting and innovative speaking test. WebCAPE selects multiple-choice questions as a result of the answer to the previous question and thus "adapts" to the student's level of ability. WebCAPE determines the student's competency level in about 20 minutes. Languages available:
- German
- French
- Spanish
- ESL
True North
In the speaking test, you will be asked to listen to a series of sentences of various difficulty and complexity, and then asked to repeat and record as much as you can remember of that sentence. This test is designed to measure how well someone can store and retrieve sentences in their short-term memory and, based on that understanding, their speaking ability. The only way people can store and repeat longer and more difficult sentences is by using their understanding of the language to divide the sentences into larger units of meaning. By measuring the difficulty of sentences a person can repeat, we can calculate their speaking ability. Languages available:
- German
- French
- Spanish
- Japanese
- ESL