Languages
To look at the bright side of things, I did sit my language exam – oh yes, INSEAD has a strict language requirement. Every student must speak three languages in order to graduate – in fact, one of the students from last promotion “forgot” to sit his language exam and has not yet been delivered his diploma. Actually, I just spent a few months traveling to brush up my third language skills.
Having peeked through some of the possible questions at these exams, I was starting to panic as I could not even answer the questions for the exam in my mother tongue. However, I found the actual exam truly easy, I got some obnoxiously high mark which probably does not correspond to my actual skills. According to my language marks, I am now fluent in three languages.
INSEAD might be torn between the desire to maintain a high standard of international flavor while being able to attract great people and for a certain country which will remain nameless, a language requirement might be a deterrent. All in all, an overwhelming majority of people in my section is perfectly bilingual and a lot of languages are spoken in the corridors.
In fact, I think that one guy traded his brain for a microcomputer. He speaks 7 languages quasi fluently.