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What alternatives to the HSK are available?


Friday

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  • 4 months later...

Is there no other choice in exams?

 

I'm looking for an exam more similar to the TOEFL, TOEIC, or IELTS, but for Chinese. These exams: are many hourse in length; include multiple essay writing sections; have reading questions that actually have established contexts; have sections demonstrating one's ability to hold a conversation or to speak on a topic for an extended period of time; and provide test takers with a separated score for each skill, so that one can show employers where one's strengths and weaknesses are.

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  1. The exam should be longer. Languages are really big. For this reason, most language proficiency exams are around 3-4 hours.

There is insufficient variety in the questions.

There should be higher quality questions measuring the student's ability. Just as an example, looking at the sample oral exams, I see that only 2 questions genuinely test one's ability to speak, the other questions just test one's ability to repeat back or to read aloud.

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Good enough reasons, but I'm afraid there's nothing I know of. Only idea I have for anyone on the mainland is taking tests designed for native speakers - the 普通话测试水平, or maybe even professional exams in whatever your field of choice is. Our user Heifeng posted quite a bit on the 普通话测试水平 some years ago. 

 

You could also look out some old HSK Advanced tests (back before Hanban took it over from BLCU) - they were way tougher, although still flawed. 

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If you don't need the test score for anything specific (and in that case it's always gonna be a specific HSK level) but just want to use it for evaluation, why don't you pay a tutor to design a test for you or to just spend a few hours evaluating you? Then the feedback will be much more specific and you will know what to work on. If that's not what you're after, but rather a score for employees, then I'm afraid the HSK is your only choice.

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You could look into the Mandarin GCSE's and ALevel. I believe Cambridge and Edexcel both do these (and Cambridge exam board has testing centres in Mainland China if thats where you are based). I believe these may have the format and split that you are looking for!

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