American Sign Language (ASL) placement exams are offered for registered students at UW. Students with no previous exposure to ASL are able to register for ASL 101: Elementary American Sign Language via MyPlan or MyUW at any time.

The Linguistics department does not offer proficiency exams to those outside UW (e.g., high-school students seeking admission, prospective students, extension students, etc.); neither does it offer testing in languages not currently offered in its curriculum.

International Baccalaureate (IB) and Advanced Placement (AP) exams in American Sign Language are not currently counted among subjects with applicability towards UW graduation requirements, so cannot be used for placement. For more information, please see the IB Policy Overview page and AP Policy Overview page on the UW Office of Admissions site.

Students interested in taking the placement exam should send an email to Prof. Lance Forshay (lforshay@uw.edu) with your student number and previous experience with ASL (high school experience, college experience, at-home experience).

There is no cost for the ASL Placement test.

The basics of signing and understanding signing through a one-to-one interview conversation with Professor Forshay.

The Linguistics department does not offer study materials for the test.

The Linguistics department does not currently offer a proficiency test in ASL. If current UW students with an existing background in ASL wish to use a proficiency test in ASL to clear a world language proficiency requirement for graduation, they should contact Prof. Lance Forshay (lforshay@uw.edu) to confirm whether or not their proficiency level would be the equivalent of placement into ASL 201.

For further details on placement, students should receive a placement confirmation from the faculty member associated with the course they are planning to test in.

You can take the placement test once to determine placement - it should only be needed once. Your placement will be valid for one academic year.

Once the interview is over, the instructor will be able to determine your level of knowledge in ASL and place you into the correct course. Feedback on specific elements of assessment performance will be given at the discretion of the instructor.

No. These exams are purely to either place students into the correct class or to fulfil graduation requirements for language proficiency. First-year (elementary) or second-year (intermediate) foreign-language credit is not granted either by examination or by course completion in a student’s native language. “Native language” is defined as the language, or one of the languages, spoken in the student’s home during the first six years of their life and in which they received instruction through the seventh grade.

Students who misrepresent the extent of their background so as to gain entrance to a course at the elementary or intermediate level may be dropped from the rolls of that course.