The Walsh School of Foreign Service is perhaps best known among students — aside from the grueling Map of the Modern World course — for its intense language proficiency exams. And while fluency in a foreign language is an appropriate requirement for a school focused on international affairs, Georgetown’s methods for evaluating fluency are as diverse as the languages being tested.

Language proficiency exams are conducted and structured at the discretion of individual departments. As a result, many discrepancies exist in the rigor of these tests, not only in difficulty but in the design and emphasis on which language concepts — grammar, writing, culture, etc. — are tested, leading to vast fluctuations in pass rates.

The French proficiency exam is known to be quite difficult, while the Spanish exam has been found to be considerably easier. The Chinese exam includes an article that students are asked to read and respond to questions about, while the Italian exam includes no such section. The exam given by the German department involves a five-minute presentation on German current events.

While certain languages, like Arabic and Chinese, are widely considered to be more difficult to learn, especially for English speakers, it is clear that discrepancies between the proficiency exams of languages more similar to English — like Italian and French — are not consciously designed to account for linguistic difficulty. And while the structure and speed of the courses can be tailored to accommodate such differences, a requisite for all SFS students must be standardized and supervised, at least to some degree.

There is no logical reason why one language has a unique demand for article comprehension while another is presentation-oriented. The key to fixing this unfairness is collaboration across departments to determine, at minimum, an established format for all exams to follow.

It is difficult to truly assess a student’s grasp on a language. Ultimately, any exam in any format may fail to be a comprehensive evaluation of proficiency. The language departments, however, can do more to correct unnecessary inconsistencies in how this assessment is approached.