Intro
In November 2018, I emailed the College Board’s AP Chinese & Japanese technical support staff to clarify a note on the 2018-2019 AP Coordinator’s Manual stating that Apple computers would not be supported for use on the AP Chinese (or Japanese) exam (See “Note:” on page 127 of the manual). The response was that Apple computers have never been supported and that test sites are expected to use native Windows computers exclusively.
Our solution for the 2019 exam is to rent 40 Windows 7 Ultimate laptops from a shop in the Yongsan Electronics Mart. In December 2018 we rented one laptop to test the setup and we ran into some difficulty. It seems that if Windows was installed with an non-English “Install Language”, the AP C&J Setup CD may be unable to auto-install the Input Method Editor(s) needed for the exam. This becomes evident once running the sample tests during which the IME settings fail. We had great success following the steps below prior to running the AP C&J Setup CD.
[Note: We found that the install language for our laptops was Korean. This is found by looking in the Windows registry for
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Nls\Language
On our systems, the value of this key was 0412 (for Korean) and not 0409 (for English)
Go through the IME and Headset steps below before running the AP C&J Setup CD.
Chinese Language Input Method Editor (IME) Settings
The language needs to be set to English and the following keyboards need to be installed in Control Panel > Clock, Language, and Region > Change keyboards or other input methods. Under the “Keyboards and Languages” tab, select “Change Keyboards” and click “Add”. Select the following keyboards.
- Chinese (Simplified, PRC)
- Chinese (Simplified) – Microsoft Pinyin ABC Input Style
- Chinese (Simplified) – Microsoft Pinyin New Experience
- Chinese (Simplified) – US Keyboard
- Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan)
- Chinese (Traditional) – New Phonetic
- Chinese (Traditional) – New Quick
- Chinese (Traditional) – Phonetic
- Chinese (Traditional) – Quick
- Chinese (Traditional) – US Keyboard
- Japanese (Japan)
- Japanese
- Microsoft IME
USB Headset Setup
We also needed to change a few Sound settings to get our headsets to work properly. If you are following this at another school, you might want to do the same.
Connect the Koss CS-100 headset to the PC and open the sound settings (Control Panel > Hardware and Sound > Sound > Manage audio devices) Under the “Playback” tab, select the “USB Audio Device” and click the “Properties” button (Speaker Properties). Select the Levels tab, unmute any muted setting, move any volume sliders to the middle, and click the “OK” button.
Under the “Recording” tab, do the same as above for the microphone levels.
AP Chinese and Japanese Setup CD Steps
Once the above settings are complete, it’s time to run the AP C&J Setup CD, following the prompts. Afterward, we ran the sample exam and had no issues with typing or audio levels.