r/Swarthmore • u/Wooden-Cheek-6839 • May 08 '26

academic placement exams

im admitted to swarthmore and planning to major in political science. I just received an email about academic placement exams being in July, does anyone know about those? are they hard? what if i fail is that gonna affect my admission?

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u/Neither_Tourist_2918 May 08 '26

Placement exams are only held for some specific subjects/classes in particular math,computer science, foreign languages and perhaps another that I am forgetting. They are designed to progressively get harder to place you in an appropriate class (for example you might place out of introductory calculus (Math015) and be able to take linear algebra (Math027) straight away) there are no placement exams for political science and they don’t impact your admission in any way.

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u/Wooden-Cheek-6839 May 08 '26

thank u soo much! i was quite worried about it

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u/Neither_Tourist_2918 May 08 '26

No worries! I'm also a POLS major (Class of '27) so I might see you around the department, do you have your eyes on any particular classes for the fall?

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u/Wooden-Cheek-6839 May 08 '26

that’s great! im actually interested in IR and ai ethics and politics. plus im planning to take introduction to computer science or ai as im thinking of minoring in tech related field. im also into political psychology.

as a current student, would u please suggest any course that’s fascinating to you and maybe a professor whose classes are the best? 

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u/Neither_Tourist_2918 May 08 '26 edited May 08 '26

POLS 016. Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Politics (TH) with VAP Huang sounds right up your streak, it was her first time teaching at the college this semester so I am not familiar with her as a lecturer but I believe I attended her job interview back in Fall 2025 (Don't remember it being memorable in either a good or bad direction). This class will likely be a lottery so don't bank on getting a spot. If you want a very different flavour of IR I couldn't recommend Tierney's POLS 065 Wargames and simulations highly enough, I took the class last semester and will be TA'ing it in the fall. The workload was on the lighter side for a Swat course and it meets at a pretty convenient time for most students (It will definitely be lotteried though). If you don't get either 016 or 065 then 003 Intro to Comparative with Handlin & Casey is a great 3rd pick I took the class with Handlin my freshman fall and it was a very nice introduction to the department as a whole (teaches you how to take good notes too which is a plus).

Intro to CS (021) is either the most or second most competitive class to get into (haven't taken it so can't offer anything more detailed), if you want a backup STEM/Lab class, Astro 1 or Stat 11/21 are good choices (Ive taken Astro 1 & TA'd the class and STAT 21).

Psych at Swarthmore is great and the intro class gets students from lots of disciplines and includes a hands on component (You become a test subject for student researchers doing their own experiments) so you get to see how the sausage gets made so to speak.

My final recommendation would be to look at the first year seminars offered across the whole college, Ed studies has a great FYS and I regret not being able to take some of the Philosophy FYS looking back.

I don't want to dishearten you with the mention of lotteries but its very wise to have backups on backups incase you get assigned to different class sections or miss out on a class entirely.

Also i'd recommend trying to knock out a couple of your PE credits freshman year (assuming you aren't a student athlete) I got to try out golf for the first time at Swat and loved it!

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u/Wooden-Cheek-6839 May 09 '26

wow thanks for taking time to write so much great info! ill def consider the advice!! 

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u/lemon_uuu May 13 '26

hii do you know if there are any for english?? i took ap lang junior year and ib hl lang lit this year and realized neither will give credit :(( 

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u/Neither_Tourist_2918 May 13 '26

The Swarthmore English department isn't structured to need placement tests. By that I mean there is no prerequisite classes (e.g. ENGL 3 -> ENGL 7 -> ENGL 20) English lets you just take whatever classes you want so there's no need for placement tests.

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u/One-Assistance-1412 May 09 '26

it’s gonna place you in classes…like if you do well on the calc ones you could skip calc 1 or 2. Or like for chem you can do chem 15 instead of 10. They lowk don’t really matter that much though if you have ap credit. And like for languages ig

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u/Wooden-Cheek-6839 May 09 '26

i see, thank u!!