Korean 4th Most Popular Language in SAT II

More American students are choosing to take the Korean language elective on the U.S. Scholastic Aptitude Test II.

The U.S. Embassy in Seoul said yesterday that 4,176 American students opted to take Korean in the SAT II, making it the fourth most popular language elective of the test.

Spanish ranked first with 34,491 students, French second with 11,860 and Chinese third with 6,542. Japanese attracted 1,733 takers.

In 1997, Korean became the ninth language offered by the U.S. college entrance exam. The number of SAT II takers opting for Korean has steadily risen from 2,128 students in 1999 to 2,826 in 2003, 3,240 in 2005, and 3,888 in 2006.

The nine language electives in the SAT II are: French, German, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Modern Hebrew and Korean.