HSKIII - Jumping Ahead to the Writing Section

[jaytea]

I'm going to be taking the HSKIII exam in-person at an exam centre soon, and I'm a little worried about the writing part. I know the marking of it is a little subjective, but I'm trying to find some information on what the basic criteria are (ie. characters need to be roughly the same height/width, aligned on the page, appropriate punctuation, etc.). 

 

Most importantly, I'm wondering if test takers are generally able to skip ahead to the writing section after completing the reading section, and use the remainder of their allotted 30 minutes on writing. In practice exams I tend to finish the reading with 5-10 minutes to spare, so I'd love to be able to use this time to get a head start on the writing. Is this allowed, or will invigilators kick up a fuss if you do this?

 

Hopefully someone with experience can weigh in!

[alantin]

I've only done the online test, but I've asked this question around too and basically in the written test there seems to not be a rule that have to give the reading part pages away and start another clock to do the written part. So you should be able to even do the written part first if you like. However, the written part is basically putting the words given to you in the right order and copying them.

 

Also there are a few pictures and you need to write some kind of a remark on each picture. And you can go back to the other pages to find examples of how characters are written, if you don't remember how to write them. So frankly I personally don't have any idea how someone would need 30 minutes for that.

It took me 15 minutes to do the written part in HSK4 test, but I ran out of time in the reading part. You must read really fast! ?

[mungouk]

They're not assessing your handwriting, just whether or not you write the correct character(s).

 

HSK 3 barely even counts as writing... presumably you've done some mock tests?

 

Q71-75 is just putting the given chunks of text in the correct order to make a grammatically correct sentence.

 

Q76-80 is a gap fill, writing one character when given the pinyin. 

 

None of this is graded subjectively; it's right or wrong.

[RekaT]

Hello,

I have just sat HSK 3 last Saturday, so the writing section is only 15 minutes, just like in the previous tests. Since we do not have paper based exams in my country, I had difficulty remembering some of them, in the last part, when you you have to write 5 characters. I wish it had been computer based, it would have been so much easier! Because I can read most of them but I can't hand write all of them. 

Plus my handwriting in terrible even in English as I don't really hand write much at all. 

I am not sure if you are allowed to go back to the previous section to check how they are written, and you don't really have the time for that, either.

So it looks like I have to re-sit it in December. We'll see.