Dude,

"Knowledge proficiency" is a placement measure used by universities to correctly place a student within a course of study's defined prerequisite stream.

For example, my children attended a Japanese language immersion school, my oldest entered the school in 2nd grade and my youngest entered in kindergarten. A foreign language immersion school teaches its language in a remarkably different way than does a university. The university stresses the rules of grammar in a very objective and removed way, while the immersion school teaches the same in a way that stresses the intuitive knowing of the language much, much more than the academic knowing. So my daughters knew Japanese through language immersion in Japanese, but then had to be placed in the university prerequisite stream at a place where they could succeed without being bored and without being expected to know grammar structures that they had never learned in a strictly academic way. Such placements were awkward and not entirely correct because they were necessarily conservative, but they had to be done to make the leap from one setting to another. So at 11 years old, my oldest took Second Year Japanese at the university during Summer Term, that is: an entire three-term (one year) sequence in one term. My youngest took two terms of Fourth Year Japanese at the university at the beginning of her freshman year in high school.

Steven A. Sylwester