Yesterday I took the HSK exam and thought I’d share some thoughts on the experience.
In Indianapolis, the exam is administered by the Confucius Institute at IUPUI, and for whatever reason, the exam is paper-based, not computer-based.

When signing up for the HSK, you get an email from chinesetest.cn confirming that you’ve booked a spot for the test. It just has the date, not the time. A few weeks before the test, you get a follow-up email telling you the time to show up for the exam. My Chinese teacher, who also works for the Confucius Institute, said they have to wait until the registration deadline passes to figure out how many people are signed up, so they can work out a schedule of when the tests should take place. For me, the follow up email said the exam was to take place at 13:30 yesterday (the email actually used 13:30, not 1:30 PM).

However, last week during class, our teacher said our HSK we should arrive at 8:30, not 1:30. Apparently one of the test takers requested to take the test in the morning, so they moved us all to a new time. I think this was a bit unofficial, since I didn’t get a new email reflecting this new time.

Arriving for the test, the requirements are a photo ID (the same ID that was used for test registration), a 2B pencil, and the test ticket. I forgot to print my test ticket, but luckily the teacher did that for us (all of the test-takers for the HSK 1 were students from her class). I didn’t think it was important, but it turns out it is. The test ticket has information that has to be transferred to the test form. The test form itself is a fill-in-the-bubbles style of paper which will presumably be scanned for scoring.

There were three of us at the exam, but four were scheduled. It turns out one of us had to work (even though it was a Saturday). 老师 handed out our test tickets and the blank test forms, then had us spend a few minutes transferring information from the tickets.

Note: The exam form said that we should write down our name as it appears on our ID, even though it wasn’t required during registration. This led to some confusion about whether we needed to add our middle names. Most state IDs include a middle name or initial, but we seldom use them in our everyday lives. I registered for the exam as Michael Hawkes, but my ID says Michael Peter Hawkes, and I ended up writing down the latter on the test form.

After we finished with that, 老师 handed out the sealed test booklets and told us not to open them right away. She read out the official HSK instructions, which were in Chinese, but she also gave us brief translations (e.g. “Don’t open the test booklets yet.”)

The HSK level 1 exam has two parts: listening comprehension and reading comprehension. Each section has 20 questions. For the listening part, there is an official HSK audio file that is played (I think it’s from a CD, but I’m not sure). The audio says something, and we pick out the best response from those listed in the booklet. The audio section is a mixture of true/false and multiple choice questions. While I didn’t understand everything that was said, I understood enough to get the right answers (I hope). The reading comprehension section was fairly similar with the true/false and multiple choice questions, but the last few questions confused me a bit. It was a section of five fill-in-the-blanks type of questions, and there were five 汉字 to choose from. However, two of the characters were ones I didn’t know, so I had to guess where they were supposed to go. Since I’m pretty confident i guessed correctly on the other three, that gives me a 50/50 chance of getting them right or wrong.

Note: By the way, downloading HSK 1 practice exam from www.chinesetest.cn and using it to study was very helpful. The format of the practice exam was the same as that of the actual test, though the questions were obviously different.

After 老师 collected the exams, we left. The exam scores are supposed to be listed on the www.chinesetest.cn website in 30 days and after 45 days we should be able to get the certificates. I presume the tests are being sent to China to be graded. The maximum score is 200 points and 120 points are needed to pass.

The local Confucius Institute offers the HSK test twice a year, once in the spring and once in the autumn. My plan is to take the HSK level 2 exam this coming fall, and possible take the level 3 exam next spring, though I’ll have to wait and see. The number of words and characters to know grows with each level of HSK exam. Below is a list of how many words a test-taker must know for each level:

Basically, each level of the test is double the level of difficulty of the previous level, and hypothetically should take twice as long to learn. While I’m pretty confident I can take and pass the HSK level 2 exam this fall, I’m not positive I’ll be able to learn enough to pass the HSK level 3 by spring of 2015. We’ll see.

Next Saturday, April 12th, I take the HSK level at 1:30 pm at the Confucius Institute at IUPUI. About a month ago I took an HSK Level 1 practice exam and supposing I scored it correctly, I did pretty good. Also, since my grade in class is just over 90%, I feel good about doing the 汉语水平考试.

When I registered, they didn’t give us the time of the exam. My Chinese teacher, who also runs the local Confucius Institute said it was because they have to determine how many people are the different levels of the HSK exam that day. I guess they want to make sure all the Level 1 examinees take the test at the same time, all the Level 2 examinees take their test at the same time and so on. Since this is the only HSK testing center in Indiana, we will probably have students learning Chinese at other schools and colleges.

One odd thing is that the test is given on paper at this location. I’m not sure why that is, but I guess it probably has to do with the center’s funding and the requirements for computer-based test centers. When I took my CompTIA exam in January, that test center was sort of high security. Test takers had to leave belongings in lockers outside the testing room. The only thing we could bring in was the key to the locker. I wasn’t even allowed to wear my analog watch. I imagine HSK probably has similar requirements for its computer-based test centers.