My Experiences with the Goethe-Zertifikat-B2 Exam at the Goethe-Institut Sydney

[EDIT on 08/01/2013: To anyone planning to do the B2 exam soon, please also check out my post-mortem where I examine what went right and what went wrong]

In this post I'll write about the actual day of my exam and how things ran. The intention is to give future test candidates some perspective about what the test setup is like, and also just to record it now while the memory is fresh, because my mind is like swiss cheese usually.

I'll start with the night before when, at about 9pm, as I finally had my first opportunity to study for the exam the next day, my daughter, who we had just put down to bed, vomited. She had been coming down with something since the night before, but this was her first vomit. It was on the floor, wall, in her bed and in her hair. So, it was off to the shower for the second time that night, and a bunch of washing had to be done too once she'd got back to bed. By about 10-10:30pm I was sitting down again, finally ready to study.

You see, it's shit like this that I think people without kids can't appreciate. Yes, we all have jobs, or other studies, and all sorts of other junk to deal with too. But then, when you've dealt with all that other crap, and you finally sit down (late) to do some final study, your kid throws up all over themself in bed. The joys of parenting!

At this stage I decided not to do too much so I could get to bed earlier, but I still didn't get to bed till just after midnight. I got to sleep alright, but at 5am I woke up from something and just couldn't get back to sleep due to thinking about the exam. Oh, and the rain was BUCKETING down. I mean in sheets as thick as lead. The weather chose to continue doing this for the rest of the day, which explains why the road outside the Goethe Institut in Sydney was flooded and they had literally had sand-bags protecting one of their entrances. Crazy!

My plan was to not use English once I entered the Goethe-Institut so as to get into the right frame of mind and stay there. This was immediately broken when, as I stepped through the door, the receptionist said "are you all here for the exams? Upstairs, please". In the waiting room upstairs I found about, I don't know 10-15 people, all waiting for the exams. I didn't get much of a chance to talk to anyone then as I had to make a trip to the bathroom - nerves will do that to you. When I came out we went to register. The people who were still standing there waiting to register were all asked what level they were doing. They were all either A1 or A2. I found out later that one girl was doing B1, and I was the only one doing B2. When I was asked what exam I was doing, despite being asked in English and despite the fact that everyone else had answered in English, I stuck to my plan and answered in German :-)

Then we returned upstairs. I had a chance to guess at everyone's ages by this stage, and I think that, although I may have been one of the oldest, there was a broad range. I would say mostly mid-20's to mid-30's, with one or two younger. I can't say I looked at everyone in detail though, but it was far from my "nightmare" mix of heaps of high school or early university students all doing the B2 exam or higher, and all being much better than me!

After a short while all the people for the A1 and A2 exams were taken off to separate rooms for their introductions to the exam conditions, etc. There were three of us left in the waiting room - me, the young woman doing the B1 exam, and another woman who had come in with one of the men doing the A1 exam. Whenever anyone coming through asked us if we were here for the exams, this woman was at pains to point out that she was just here as moral support with her boyfriend and that she was a native speaker. What luck for me! We started chatting in German and had a good 5 minutes to talk about why her boyfriend was there (they were planning on emigrating to Germany, so he needed to have some language skills to show for the immigration application process, and I guess even A1 is enough to count as something, as basic as it is). During our chat the young woman doing the B1 exam asked this German speaker something, which the native speaker didn't understand. I'm pretty sure I remember understanding it, or just not hearing it properly because she spoke too quietly. The German woman had to ask her to repeat it several times. I don't think it was wrong, or her accent was bad (it sounded good to me in this short sample), she just lacked the confidence to project her voice adequately when speaking German. I felt really bad for her, because I felt like that could really knock her confidence before the exam. Looking back, I wish I had told her to come sit with us so she could chat too. I hate thinking that this might have shaken her a little. I know I would have felt bad if the German speaker had kept asking me to repeat.

Luckily for me, since I was sitting next to her, she could understand me perfectly. I told her the spoken part was the bit I was most worried about because I left practising it till too late, but she very reassuringly told me that I'll do very well because my German was very good. What better compliment could you receive right before a German exam! A great confidence boost!

We were then called down to do our exams in separate rooms. I had a whole classroom to myself, which was both relaxing and weird at the same time :-) The order of exam components was all completely different to what I expected. I was given the written components in the following order:

1) Hörverstehen (Listening comprehension)
2) Schriftlicher Ausdruck (Written expression)
3) Leseverstehen (reading comprehension)

I expected the order to be 3, 1, 2, but it didn't matter too much, though I might have preferred not to do the listening section first!

I found out later that the exam organiser was locking me in to the room, and it could only be opened from the outside. Woah! Fire risk! Sure, it's cheaper and easier for them to run, but if someone burns to death some day during an exam, there'll be hell to pay...

So, Hörverstehen. I think it went OK. It's in two sections - the first part you hear only once, and you need to fill in the correct details in a table of information - surely some sort of itinerary. These 5 questions are worth 2 marks each, so I was very disappointed that I missed one of them. I knew I had the answer wrong so when I copied it over to the answer book, I just had a guess, but that was almost certainly 2 points gone, without allowing for other mistakes. Oh well. The second part is 10 questions worth 1.5 each. I think this part went better and less ambiguously than many of my practice runs had gone, so I think it was OK. My usual score for this part is about 7/10 = 10.5/15 points. I hope I got enough in the first section to bring this over the 15/25 required.

Just a sidenote, it's not strictly necessary to get 15 out of 25 in every section. You need 45/75 for the written parts, and 15 out of 25 for the spoken part (at least, of course!) to pass. However, I made it my goal to not let any area be weak enough that I needed to hope for cross-subsidisation between them.

The Schriftlicher Ausdruck section went OK I think. There's a written composition part, and correcting errors in a letter. I think the second one I got at least 6 in. I would have said 7, but I made a silly change as I was copying my answers to the answer sheet that's given me doubts. However, I've just looked it up and even the answer I thought was right is wrong, so I can stop worrying about it. I definitely got it wrong! :-) Damn... I knew there was something else in that sentence which I wasn't sure about, but I was so sure of this one that I ignored the other thing. Oh well, can't change it now.

In the free composition, I did this differently to how I practised it. In practice, I had written a rough version and then copied that over as a final version. VERY, VERY TIME-CONSUMING! I noticed that I wasn't making many corrections during this time, so in the exam I made brief notes of sentence fragments and words for each point and then just tried to compose it once and write it neatly. Any bad mistakes I just crossed through and wrote again. This gave me time at the end to re-read it at least once, which is good. It seemed mostly basic in its sentence structure (I deliberately tried to keep it that way to avoid tricking myself with over-complicated sentences) but it covered everything and had a decent flow. You are required to write at least 180 words - I think mine was at least 300! One thing I should have done at the end is to focus on grammatical errors of mismatches in the endings on the articles (words like "ein", "der") and related words ("mein", "dein", etc) and adjectives. I know what these should be, but often get them wrong in writing when I'm rushing (and VERY often when I'm speaking! This might be my next goal to fix up!).

Finally came the Leseverstehen. The first question in it was a bit awkward - it seemed very broad and ambiguous. Usually I scream through this in practice questions and get it close to 100% right, but this time I'm not so sure. It also took me more than the suggested 15 minutes, but I easily made up this loss on all the other sections (I can read quite fast now when the texts are at B2 level). The other question I had issues with is one that always gets me - the one where you have to say whether the author sees something as positive, or negative/sceptical (or ambiguous, really). So, you have a 50/50 shot. Should be easy! Except that even when I understand the text 100%, and the question 100%, I often find myself strongly disagreeing with the answer. They seem to expect you to find just the first sentence that relates to the question and form your opinion off that, but not always. And therein lies the rub. So, yeah, I think this question annoying. I could easily have got a couple wrong because the possible answer could go either way.

Overall, however, the reading section went OK and I was reasonably happy with it.

I think that all the written parts were OK. I'm reasonably confident that I could pass this part.

After a short 5 minute break, I started my preparation for the spoken part. It went quite well. As I was on my own, I didn't get a choice about the topic, but the topic I got was OK. I used some of the thoughts I had put together for some written practice prior to the exam, because the topics all overlap quite a lot to be honest. One thing that went wrong here is that I didn't make any notes for the dialogue question. (I just spent too much time on the monologue preparation, and didn't get into the right frame of mind for the dialogue. This may   prove to have been a big mistake.

At the appointed time one of the oral examiners came to collect me. I went into one of the front offices, which was nicely lit and a pleasant change of venue from the dark, cold classroom where I had done the other parts. I was introduced to my two examiners, and after a brief exchange of pleasantries, I began my monologue. My memory of it now is that it went OK. Probably about as good, or slightly better, than some of my better practice runs. It was actually much easier to deliver it to an audience than when I practised it by speaking into my mobile phone and listening back later. A real audience, on the contrary from being scary, actually helped with important visual cues of their attention, as well as the occasional brief word of agreement, or acknowledgement of what was said, which helped a lot with the flow I felt.

The second part, the dialogue, was done with one of the examiners because I was the only B2 candidate. He was very nice and friendly, and put me at ease. However, I hadn't prepared for this section, and I didn't have a lot to say about each thing - I should have at least looked over the photos in advance and had a think. Also, I committed the cardinal sin of letting him direct the conversation. I don't think I ever explicitly elicited his feedback, except with the occasional "oder?" or something similar. I was interactive, but more responsive than proactive. I'm really annoyed at myself because I knew one of the marking criteria where I could get points without necessarily knowing more German was by being very interactive, and I don't think I did enough of this to overcome some of my weaknesses where I would score lower. I had no trouble understanding the examiner, and he didn't have any understanding me (at least, none that he showed), but I'm just not sure how this part would pan out for me.

These two parts are worth equal marks overall, so only time will tell now. However, I do already know that spending ALL of my preparation time on the monologue was misguided. I got about 15 minutes to prepare (actually a little less), of which I would suggest to anyone else doing this exam that they spend 3-5 minutes on preparing for the dialogue. I had also prepared a small list of phrases specifically to help with the dialogue, eliciting feedback, etc. I hardly used any of these. It didn't help that I only compiled the list on the night before the exam, and with my limited time available, I didn't really practise them enough to make them flow out of me. I had also, obviously, never practised the dialogue section. I considered asking my Austrian friend at work to help me do that on the day before the exam, but as luck would have it she was off sick that day. All my own fault, of course, for leaving the specific spoken practice so late.

My honest final assessment is that I felt that, although I'm not guaranteed to pass, which is really where I wanted to be before the exam, I should at least come very close. It was definitely the right exam for me to take - B1 would have been too easy, and, although I think I could do OK on a C1 exam, OK in this context would most likely be a fail, especially in the spoken section. So, yeah, whatever the result, I now think of myself as being at B2 level. Still, it would be really, really nice if Goethe agreed. Then I could proudly write the name of my certificate on my resume!

PHEW! Sorry, that was a big post. If you made it this far, your reward is to know that I'll write a post sometime in the near future assessing my studies to this date - what went right, what went wrong, ideas for how to improve in the future, etc.

Danke fürs Lesen!