Sanskrit placement interviews are offered for registered students at UW. Students with no previous exposure to Sanskrit are able to register for SNKRT 101: Elementary Sanskrit via MyPlan or MyUW at any time. For full information, please see this page.

The Asian Languages & Literature department does not offer placement or proficiency exams to students outside of UW (e.g., high school students seeking admission, prospective students, extension students,etc.), nor does it offer testing in languages or dialects not currently taught in the department. UW Students looking to take a proficiency test for a language or dialect not taught by the Asian Languages & Literature department should contact the UW Language Learning Center (LLC).

International Baccalaureate (IB) and Advanced Placement (AP) exams in Sanskrit 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 who are registered at UW Seattle who are interested in Sanskrit language and would like to start or continue their studies should email Sanskrit language professor Joseph Marino via jamarino@uw.edu. Students should include their name, UW Seattle student ID number, and a confirmation of their uw.edu e-mail address when scheduling a placement interview.

There is no fee associated with placement testing for Sanskrit at UW Seattle.

Placement interviews typically require students to demonstrate speaking and listening skills in a conversation with a faculty member. Separate essays submitted remotely may also be required.

Students who want to take a Sanskrit proficiency exam in order to waive the one-year College of Arts & Sciences world language requirement for graduation should email Professor Joseph Marino via jamarino@uw.edu in order to inquire about the availability of a proficiency test.

Study materials for Sanskrit are not available at this time.

Please see this page for the Asian Languages & Literature department’s policies on exam reporting. If you are taking the Sanskrit test for the purpose of fulfilling any requirement other than the College of Arts & Sciences one-year foreign language requirement (for example, proficiency requirements for degrees in JSIS, CISB, Linguistics), you must email the language program coordinator jameel7@uw.edu by the deadline listed in the page linked above indicating where you need the scores sent.

For further details on placement testing, students should contact the faculty member associated with the level they are planning to test in.

There is no current limit for the number of times a student can take placement tests in Sanskrit. However, we recommend students try to give themselves at least 4 weeks between tests to allow sufficient time to study in a way that will see scores improve in a meaningful way.

Once the interview is over, the instructor will be able to determine your level of knowledge in Sanskrit and place you into the correct course. Feedback on specific elements of assessment performance will be at the discretion of the instructor. Test results are valid for one year.

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.