There are no advanced levels in American secondary schools. Level 3 and Level 4 students are all Level 1 students.
This is because of the 10,000 hour thing, which I will assume readers know about from previous posts, videos, books, and/or Zoom trainings. Indeed, if it takes 10,000 hours to attain any degree of authentic proficiency (means information stored in the unconscious mind that is available with no thinking), then why are we calling a student with 200-300 hours of actual CI instruction (a realistic number to describe four years of secondary school comprehensible input) “advanced”? That’s only 1/50th of the time they need.
In my mind, an advanced student is one who HAS NOT MEMORIZED information. Strong levels of proficiency don’t happen when kids are prepped for tests. The College Board has, however, done a great job of dumbing their AP exams with an eye on keeping customers (in the AP testing world teachers are customers).
I would like to suggest, then, that some of us at some point start pushing for dropping the AP exam in World Language study because it is a business, not a “board” at all, which uses our children as kind of sales items between the College Board (sounds so impressive but would be more aptly labeled as a business that sells prestige).
Back to my point: I think we should just label all four language levels in high school for what they are, beginning levels.
Since I care little about whom I offend, I will call out the army of sanctimonious teachers (myself 20 years ago) who on a daily basis skew the system against the many in favor of the few. All that does is compromise our job security because we have so few students in those “upper level” (not) classes .
To say it again: the College Board is a business that has over the past four decades consistently lowered its standards, lowered the bar, to keep the cash cow flowing while excluding millions of kids from the party, and it is that exclusion from the upper levels where the few privileged kids in the school are given a platform by the school to perpetuate the age-old message in our field that only certain kids can learn a language, when this is in gross and stinky conflict with the research.