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I have Spanish as a minor which I've pretty much completed already, because of that I've taken 20ish credits of Spanish at the 300-400 level. Now I was thinking about throwing in some Spanish 101/102 classes in my later years at college because they would take up none of my time and I could easily get an A in them to boost my GPA. Would admissions look down on this?

I'm all for padding the GPA, but if I were the Spanish prof I'd be incredibly annoyed with you, and I have a hard time thinking a college would give you credit for 101-102 level classes *after* doing 300-400 level ones.

A. Nony Mouse wrote:I'm all for padding the GPA, but if I were the Spanish prof I'd be incredibly annoyed with you, and I have a hard time thinking a college would give you credit for 101-102 level classes *after* doing 300-400 level ones.

I suppose they might be, and that's what I initially thought but I looked and didn't see anything from the university stipulating I couldn't.

Maybe it would be best if I just picked up intro to French classes and learned French. Would they look down upon taking intro to French classes as a junior/senior?

I think taking French would be a much better idea, and I don't think anyone would look down on that (though I also tend to think people are overly anxious about how their courses are going to look to adcomms. There are lots of perfectly legitimate reasons why people take intro courses later in college). If you're comfortable in Spanish you should have no problems doing well in intro French.

mattf wrote:

A. Nony Mouse wrote:I'm all for padding the GPA, but if I were the Spanish prof I'd be incredibly annoyed with you, and I have a hard time thinking a college would give you credit for 101-102 level classes *after* doing 300-400 level ones.

I suppose they might be, and that's what I initially thought but I looked and didn't see anything from the university stipulating I couldn't.

Maybe it would be best if I just picked up intro to French classes and learned French. Would they look down upon taking intro to French classes as a junior/senior?

not at all. if your UG allows you to take intro Spanish I would totally do that and get those easy A's though. I dont get how you skipped those intro classes and got a minor though. if you waived the intro prereq because of high school classes or whatever then your UG is probably not gonna let you take them, if I had to guess.

Kratos wrote:

mattf wrote:

A. Nony Mouse wrote:I'm all for padding the GPA, but if I were the Spanish prof I'd be incredibly annoyed with you, and I have a hard time thinking a college would give you credit for 101-102 level classes *after* doing 300-400 level ones.

I suppose they might be, and that's what I initially thought but I looked and didn't see anything from the university stipulating I couldn't.

Maybe it would be best if I just picked up intro to French classes and learned French. Would they look down upon taking intro to French classes as a junior/senior?

not at all. if your UG allows you to take intro Spanish I would totally do that and get those easy A's though. I dont get how you skipped those intro classes and got a minor though. if you waived the intro prereq because of high school classes or whatever then your UG is probably not gonna let you take them, if I had to guess.

They don't have the classes waived. But I had to take a placement exam and placed into Spanish 303 so my academic advisor went into the computer and changed the permissions for me to add Spanish 303 to my schedule without the pre-reqs of it.

I agree that you should just take French, which will probably come easy to you if you've done Spanish. To the extent law schools might ever care about padding your GPA it'd be in this kind of situation.

Wahrheit wrote:Why not do independent study with your favorite prof?

I did a pair of "directed readings" courses in my minor that basically amounted to independent study with a faculty supervisor ... I bet something similar exists for Spanish-language content in your dept.

It should go without saying that taking 10x after passing 40x is a bad look.

Kratos wrote:

mattf wrote:

A. Nony Mouse wrote:I'm all for padding the GPA, but if I were the Spanish prof I'd be incredibly annoyed with you, and I have a hard time thinking a college would give you credit for 101-102 level classes *after* doing 300-400 level ones.

I suppose they might be, and that's what I initially thought but I looked and didn't see anything from the university stipulating I couldn't.

Maybe it would be best if I just picked up intro to French classes and learned French. Would they look down upon taking intro to French classes as a junior/senior?

not at all. if your UG allows you to take intro Spanish I would totally do that and get those easy A's though. I dont get how you skipped those intro classes and got a minor though. if you waived the intro prereq because of high school classes or whatever then your UG is probably not gonna let you take them, if I had to guess.

To add on to this - what my school does is if you take a class you already got waived due to high school AP or something then you can still take the class but it won't count as credit towards your degree so it may not affect your GPA. Now LSAC might count this differently - but I would look up how your school factors it on your transcript otherwise the whole point of you padding your GPA won't even work.

But anyways I would take French - might as well learn something new that probably isn't going to be too difficult for you