All students are expected to be able to function adequately within all four skills. Allowance is however made for students to indicate their own emphases or to compensate for their weaknesses in that, in the evaluation process, poor competence in one skill can be counterbalanced by better competence in another. All language courses in Arabic at Penn are proficiency-based. Students are evaluated on their ability to perform authentic tasks in the target language. At this stage it is normal for the undergraduate segment of the Arabic language program to come to an end.
Admission is on the basis of a higly competitive national examination in Arabic.
A further opportunity for undergraduate students during the summer months is the Arabic School at Middlebury College in Vermont where, in a living-learning environment which requires that Arabic only be spoken, students are able to enhance all four of their language skills as part of an extremely intensive and demanding program. Beyond this level Penn offers a series of graduate seminar courses which concentrate on the application of a highly advanced reading skill to the areas specified within the graduate program. All students are expected to acquire some competence in all four skills whatever their motivations for learning the language may be. Grammatical accuracy is given increasing weight as students proceed through the sequence of courses, but it is not regarded as an end in itself. Testing Students are evaluated in terms of these goals in two distinct ways.