All the Language departments and Language Schools at Middlebury require students to take a placement exam before enrolling in language courses or programs in order to ensure students take courses at a level appropriate to their knowledge of the language they want to study. Amongst language departments, the Spanish department was the first to create an online version of their placement exam in a web application referred to as Measure. Prof. Nancy O’Connor used the Spanish department exam as a guide for developing an exam for students of French.
The exam contains about 45 questions, most of which are either multiple-choice or cloze type questions. Some questions refer to images of product labels, tickets or forms that students might encounter in a French-speaking country. There are also listening comprehension questions and a short essay question. The exam is configured to allow students to only access the questions once and has a time limit of 1 hour 30 minutes. Student answers are saved to a database and can be exported into a spreadsheet. Results from this exam determine what level courses students are allowed to take at Middlebury.