***Students enrolled in 321 and 206 will receive an email with information regarding when to sign up for the exam. Please be patient and wait for these instructions as they may come late in the semester. The exam is scheduled at different times each semester.***
Requirements:
To see if you are eligible to take the Challenge Exam, please read Challenge Exam Policies. In order to take this exam, students must be enrolled in a BYU Spanish or Portuguese class. Please note that once students have graduated, they are not eligible for challenging any additional credit at BYU unless it is specific to the graduate program to which the students have been admitted. This applies to graduate students and post-baccalaureate students.
Most returned missionaries should take PORT 321 or SPAN 321. Returned missionaries who wish to strengthen their language skills may start with Spanish 206 or Port 206 and may take the exam for up to 12 credits.
Native speakers cannot take the exam for their native language. For example, a native Spanish speaker cannot take the Spanish exam but can take the Portuguese exam.
The exam MUST be taken during your FIRST Spanish/Portuguese class at BYU or your FIRST Spanish/Portuguese class after the mission. If you choose not to take it this semester, you cannot take it during a future semester.
According to university policy, if a student has taken an exam at another university, through our Off-Campus Testing Office, or has IB or AP credit, he/she may still take this test. The challenge exam will not replace those former grades or credits. All test credits will be added to student’s total credits earned.
Non-BYU students may take the challenge exam if they register for and take 321 as a visiting student during the spring/summer terms. If they do not wish to take 321, there is also an off-campus credit exam available, but it is only 12 credits and is Pass/Fail. Please contact Foreign Language Achievement Testing Service at 801-422-3512 or visit their website for more information.
Registration and Taking the Exam:
All students in 321 and 206 will receive an email with registration information. It is the student’s responsibility to make sure their e-mail address is up-to-date in the BYU system or else they may not receive the e-mail.
You may only take the exam one time. There are no retakes.
The exam is two-hour timed and is taken on the computers in the Humanities Testing Lab in B-153 JFSB.
You can review Study Tips for the Challenge Exam.
Scores and Credits:
The challenge exam consists of 100 and 200-level courses. You do NOT need these credits for the language certificate, minor, or major. You will not need to go back and take these classes if you choose not to take the exam or choose not to accept these grades.
You decide which scores you want to put on your transcript. The scores you choose WILL affect your overall GPA and your total credit hours but will NOT affect credit caps for scholarships, applying to programs, etc.
You MUST sign for scores in person within a year of taking the exam, with ID, in 3190 JFSB in order for them to be added to your transcript. As of Winter 2018, this process has been put online. Students who took the exam during Winter 2018 or later and registered through the online system will accept the grades through a link they receive through YMessage.
If it is your first semester at BYU, the scores you have accepted will appear a few days after this semester’s grades are posted. If it is not your first semester at BYU, your scores will appear within three weeks.
Challenge exam credits are considered/included when priority registration dates are calculated, as long as the credit has already posted to the student’s record when the calculation is made.
Challenge exam credits DO NOT COUNT towards the requirement for students to declare a major by the time they have earned 60 credit hours or stop them from changing their major when they reach 75 credit hours, nor are students charged a higher “Advanced Study Tuition” rate for having too many credit hours. Challenge exam credits ARE counted in the students’ total BYU credit hours and GPAs on their transcripts.