El Día Del Examen B2: 21 Noviembre 2015

I flew into town the night before the test.  I took an earlier flight and stayed at the same hotel as the year before.  I wouldn’t be in the country to enjoy Thanksgiving so I ordered turkey with mashed potatoes and stuffing from a nearby diner.  It was terrible, but better than no Thanksgiving food at all.

The next morning I arrived at the familiar test center and strangely not many people were there.  Two sisters from Europe were taking the A2 exam, me, another guy, and a teenage girl were taking the B2 exam, and some guy was taking the C1 exam.  I think two people didn’t show up so they moved our oral tests to an earlier time.  The mother of the girl was with her before the exams started and I could tell that the girl would have no problems because her mother was a native Spanish speaker and was talking to her in Spanish.  For all parts of the test, she finished earlier than me and the other guy and she would sit around fiddling with her pencil or chair.

This time the test didn’t start out as rough as the prior year because it didn’t start with the listening section.  We began with reading analysis and I felt good reading the first piece.  It was a scientific article about the unhealthy eating habits in Colombia.  I had spent 5 weeks in Colombia the year before.  It didn’t help me with that section of the test, but brought back some positive memories about my vacation.  There was more subjunctive, verb combos, and conditionals than B1, but I was prepared for it.  When I checked my results a few months later, I got a score of 15.97 out of 25 in this section.

Next came the listening section.  It was quite difficult and I didn’t have much confidence in most of my answers.  The worst part was an interview with a famous Mexican composer. There was also a part about some kind of trade fair or expo in…Portugal?  I don’t remember the country.  One annoying part about this section was that one of the examiners from one of the other tests came in to talk to the examiner for my test.  They weren’t talking loudly, but they weren’t exactly talking quietly either.  It was distracting trying to listen to fast foreign audio while they were also speaking in the background.  I remember the same thing happened the year before too.  Fue terrible.  I guess they need to coordinate to make sure everybody is on schedule, but they should either send each other text message or go to the corner of the room and whisper to each other. When I checked my results a few months later, I got a score of 10.83 out of 25 in this section.

I believe we had a 15 minute break after the listening.  I talked to the other guy about the difficulties of the test.  Interestingly, he loved Colombia too.  He had studied there a bit and had some friends there.  He planned to go for a week-long visit soon.

After the break was the writing section.  It was two parts like the B1, but the first part had a listening section.  We listened to a report about a small city that recently began hosting a big international music festival each year.  The festival is great for the economy of the city, but the residents complain about the noise and trouble caused by the visitors.  We had to write a letter to the mayor of the city from a citizen’s perspective with suggestions for improving the situation.  I liked this piece and complained to the neighbor about kids pissing and puking in my lawn.  The second part was more difficult because the two topics I wasn’t familiar with.  The year before, the second part of B1 had personal topics where you write about something in your life.  The second part of B2 had general topics.  The first topic was the housing preferences of citizens of Spain vs housing preferences of tourists.  There was a bar graph comparing the two in categories such as hotels, camping, and rural destinations.  You had to write an analysis of the statistics.  I was unsure of the meanings of some of the vocabulary in the graph so I chose the second topic.  The second topic was to read a book review of a popular new book from a critic and then write your own review of the book.  When I checked my results a few months later, I got a score of 16.67 out of 25 in this section.

After a solitary lunch, I returned to the test center around 2:30pm for the oral exam.  I was given two topics to choose from.  I chose ecological tourism as my topic and had some time to prepare a speech about it.  The preparation room was a lot cleaner than last time and did not have papers scattered on the desks.  I had to look at a list of proposed solutions to make tourism for a beach town more ecological and give advantages or disadvantages from 5 of the proposals.  The preparation time seemed to fly by and I wasn’t quite sure if I was ready for the speech when they came knocking.  It wasn’t that I was uncomfortable speaking about the topic.  It was just that it was difficult to memorize all the solutions and the advantages/disadvantages in that time so I would have to look at my note paper a lot.  If they had a person just giving me one proposal at a time during an interview, I might have been more comfortable with it rather than trying to go through a list.  The examiner sat behind me out of sight and the interviewer sat face to face with me.  When the interviewer introduced herself to me, it was the same interviewer as the year before.  She asked me if I preferred “tú” or “Usted” just as she had done the year before.  I told her I preferred “vos”, but “tú” was also okay.  The speech went alright and after the speech she asked me questions about ecological tourism.  I wasn’t sure if I was answering her correctly because it seemed like some of her questions were very similar and she would look at the examiner for approval of my answer kind of like Alex Trebek checking an unusual answer with the judges.  For the second part of the oral section, I chose a photo with three people sitting in a car and looking at a folding paper map.  I described what I saw and tried to use as much subjunctive as possible.  The interviewer asked me some questions such as “Have you ever been in a situation like this before?  What did you do?”  I told her a story about getting lost and then using the Google Maps app on a phone to find the way.  When I checked my results a few months later, I got a score of 19.23 out of 25 in this section.  I thought I had done worse than my B1 oral exam, but I actually improved my score.  Maybe my use of subjunctive helped me out.

It was a long test day, but there was no rest for the weary.  I was leaving on a 6:30am flight the next morning for the first leg of my 6.5-week holiday in Bolivia and Peru.

Calificaciones Tardes

When I took the B1 DELE in November 2014, the results were available online at the end of January 2015.  This year, the grades took longer to arrive.  I took the B2 DELE in November 2015 and checked at the end of January 2016 but only test results from October were available.  One of my Spanish teachers was quite curious about the results so I checked every few days for her, but no dice.  Finally I received an email today telling me that the test results were online.  I was surprised by the email because there was no such email the previous year.  Students just had to randomly login and hope their results were available.  I logged in and discovered that I had barely passed.  I needed a minimum score of 30 in each of the two groups.  Group 1 is Reading Analysis and Writing.  Group 2 is Listening and Oral Expression.  I achieved 32.64 in Group 1 and 30.06 in Group 2.  This makes me as a person with Upper Intermediate level Spanish ability.

Are you jealous that you’re at a lower level?  You shouldn’t be.  This just proves that I’m better at academic Spanish than you are.  You might be more fluent in spoken Spanish and have the ability to enjoy much more enriching experiences with native Spanish speakers than I can.  Or maybe you enjoy radio channels, films, or television shows in Spanish while I struggle to follow the dialog.

El Día Del Examen B1: 22 Noviembre 2014

I checked out of my hotel, left my luggage there, and hoofed it over to the DELE exam center.  It was drizzling, but not enough to warrant an umbrella (which I didn’t have) for the short walk there.  When I entered the front lobby, it was darkly lit and several other people were sitting around waiting in chairs.  I said a brief hello to them and found myself one of the last open chairs.  A few more people rolled into the room as time passed but the silence in the room continued to dominate.

When 8am rolled around, a lady from the test center opened a door that led us to a “middle lobby” area with some nicer furniture than the DMV-style industrialized chairs in the front lobby.  There was a kind of cash register window where they would normally help customers on weekdays.  We were allowed access to the one bathroom in the building, but the 15 or so test takers had to share it.  One of the test takers started up a conversation with the group to help lighten the mood and ease our tensions.  Somebody joked that we might see each other at the next test in April if we failed our exams.  The test center employee did a roll call and then separated us into different rooms based on test levels.  There were three B1 people including me that stayed in the same lobby.  The B2, C1, and C2 folks went upstairs to other unknown areas.  I believe B2 had the most number of test takers while C2 only had one guy.  Nobody was wasting their money on the A level that day.

The lobby where I took the test was not exactly what I expected.  I had imagined a big classroom with rows of student desks and bright overhead lights like those SAT tests way back in high school.  The three of us B1 folks were placed at tables at the sides of the room that were normally used to display brochures about Spanish-related cultural events and studying Spanish.  Later that day, from what I saw of the resources available upstairs, the other levels likely had a similar kind of test taking environment.

Each of the levels had to take four parts of the test: reading analysis, writing, listening, and speaking.  For us, we got the listening section first.  I was hoping to warm up because listening is my worst Spanish skill, but lady luck had a different idea.  The proctor played the CD tracks for us while we selected answers on the scantron.  It was annoying because they told us that we couldn’t write on the test.  Why couldn’t we write on the test?  Were they going to reuse the same test later?  Did they not print enough tests?  Instituto Cervantes needs to get their act together and kill some more trees in order to print more copies.  One part that surprised me about the audio section was that when I had practiced at home, I thought I was supposed to play all of the excerpts and then repeat them all once.  In the test, they would play one excerpt, repeat it, play the next excerpt, repeat that, and continue.  For the matching section of the listening, it was the same as I had practiced.  They played audio from all the speakers and then repeated it one time.  The matching section was brutal.  It was audio of 10 different students who were studying for their Masters degree.  Since all 10 were studying and were students, it was quite difficult to discern the difference between them all.  I had never run into such a tricky listening scenario during my practice exams.  When I checked my results a few months later, I got a score of 13.33 out of 25 in this section.

Next came the reading analysis.  While we were taking this section, we could hear a bit of the audio blaring from one of the rooms upstairs.  Maybe it was B2.  I guess each level must have their audio at a different time so as not to have noise pollution from too many CDs playing at once in all the rooms.  The most difficult part of the reading was a fill in the blank section where you had to fill in not words, but phrases.  For example, option G might be two sentences long while option B might be longer.  It was an article about the qualities of a good leader and all the phrases began to melt together and look too similar after a while.  When I checked my results a few months later, I got a score of 16.67 out of 25 in this section.

B1 wrapped up with the writing section.  Coming into the test, I had no worries about this section.  I’m a badass writer so while I might not have the vocabulary in Spanish, I can still get my point across well.  The first writing prompt was an email being written from one person to a friend that they had not seen in a while.  In the letter, you had to write about how you moved out of your parents’s house and how life is in your new neighborhood.  I was glad that it was an informal letter because I had no idea how to do formal salutations in business letters.  I had a little fun with the topic and included some interesting material for the grader to read.  I talked about how I didn’t have much money for a good place so I lived in a poor neighborhood full of homeless people and prostitutes.  I think I also mentioned that it was easy to buy drugs and maybe that I was dealing drugs.  For the second topic, we had to write about a memorable thing from our childhood.  We had to write about how we first found it, what we did with it, how we remember it, and where it is now.  I wrote about the Nintendo and Super Nintendo.  I wasn’t sure what the Spanish word for “console” was so I referred to them as “las sistemas”, “la Nintendo”, and “la Super Nintendo”.  As I write this blog entry almost a year later, I still don’t know what the word for “console” nor am I interested in knowing it.  A lot of times language isn’t about the words you don’t  know.  It’s more about how you use the words you do know.  When I checked my results a few months later, I got a score of 24.38 out of 25 in this section.

After 4 hours of testing, our group broke for lunch first since we had the shortest test.  The weather had cleared up and it was now bright and sunny.  I walked a couple of blocks down the street and ate lunch with another B1 guy.  He was from France and I think he was taking the B1 so that he could work in a kitchen in Spain.  We complained about the listening section on Masters students and the leadership article in the reading analysis section.  I rested in the lobby of my hotel for a little bit before returning to the test center.  Speaking tests began around 2pm and I was lucky to be the first person to go at around 2:15pm.  At the beginning of the day, they had given us copies of our registration documents that showed our speaking time.

I waited around outside with a few other people and around 2pm they unlocked the doors and let us back into the middle lobby.  After a few minutes, they took me upstairs to an office where the proctor offered me two prompts to talk about.  One of the prompts was about my favorite vacation.  I chose that one since I had actually done a presentation about that before for one of my teachers.  They gave me 15 minutes to prepare for it alone in the room.  The room looked like it belonged to the administrative staff of the office.  There were a few computers and also a bunch of papers cluttered all over the desks.  I finished preparing my notes for the speech in less than 10 minutes and spent the rest of the time pondering my doom.  The proctor took me across the hall to the interview room.  It was pretty barebones with one long table in the middle.  They had me sit in the middle facing the interviewer on the right side of the table.  The proctor sat on the other side of the table out of sight.  The interviewer introduced herself to me and also explained that the proctor would be grading my speaking test.  She asked some basic questions like why I was studying Spanish before I gave my speech.  The speech was not exactly what I expected.  I had imagined that it was a standing speech in front of a panel of three judges where I could move around a little and use gestures.  Instead, I was sitting at a table talking to one person.  I thought I did pretty well with the speech though.  The interviewer asked me some follow up questions about my speech before we moved into part 2 of the speaking test.  There were two pictures to choose from.  I chose the one of a family relaxing on the couches inside a winter lodge.  I studied the picture for a minute before launching into a description of what I saw.  The interviewer asked me some questions about the picture and a one of them related to whether I had any personal experience similar to what I saw there.  Then we did a roll play where I was trying to book a vacation to that place shown in the picture and the interviewer was a travel agent.  I started speaking with nosotros since I imagined talking about my family but I wasn’t as comfortable with that as yo.  I continued with nosotros since I wasn’t doing too terribly.  The interviewer and proctor then thanked me and said goodbye.  When I went downstairs to the middle lobby, I saw a few people down there and talked to the B1 guy from France a little.  One girl was laid out and passed out on a couch.  It must’ve been a rough test for her.  When I checked my results a few months later, I got a score of 17.92 out of 25 in this section.

I collected by bags from the hotel and a friend picked me up from there.  I had finished my first DELE, but I hadn’t been too worried about it.  My mind had been more focused on my first trip to South America.  I hung out with my friend over the weekend and flew back home two days later.  Two days after I flew home, I flew to Colombia for a 5-week vacation.