It might seem odd to say I made sure not to listen to some parts of the listening exam, but there it is. Incidentally, the prueba auditiva was the one in which I felt my technique (as opposed to my actual skills) played the biggest role in my grade. Also the five tasks always follow the same format, so familiarity helps a great deal.
The most important thing I learnt while preparing this part was how to deal with the speed. Some of the conversations are fast, but what’s worse is that you hardly have time to read all the text on the multiple choice exam paper. You need to keep up as there’s no chance to recapture lost audio. If you have windows open onto the street, now is the time to ask for them to be closed. Better to sweat for 40 minutes than miss a word here and there. One poor girl had a coughing fit in my exam room and briefly drowned out the audio until she very decently left the room.
What I learnt boils down to:
Read ahead whenever you can. In reality this means: From the moment the audio is started, only listen to the important bits, not to all the loud but useless blurb they play you intermittently. If you’ve prepared, you really don’t need to be listening passively while they tell you about copyright, who the examination board is, how many minutes it will last and when and where to fill in your answers. It’s a waste of time. Incidentally you can fill in your answers whenever you want. All the blurb is written down anyway, and the only instructions you might need to glance over during the exam are where it says next to each exercise (tarea) how many seconds you have to read it before the recording will begin (ranges from 20 to 30 seconds) and maybe the bit that says match five of the nine dialogues to five people, with four being left out.
You cannot read one thing and listen to something else at the same time, so trying to understand the multiple choice options on the paper and take in the audio conversations simultaneously is impossible. If you can do that then you have booked the wrong level and should be doing a harder exam!
So that’s what the reading time of 20 or 30 seconds per exercise is for, right? Well that’s enough time for the short tareas at the beginning, but the longer ones, well I couldn’t read those in my native tongue in just 30 seconds. To solve this conundrum, during the blurb, you need to read ahead and take on board the possible answers so you can easily choose the correct one when the recording is playing. So as soon as I had finished an exercise I immediately moved on to preparing the next one. You can prepare the first two (short) exercises during the initial blurb, and that gives you a head start.
If you get caught out and find yourself listening to a long radio interview only to realise you haven’t had time to read the latter questions at all… the best thing is to close your eyes and listen with your full concentration to the audio. Since you can’t read and listen without missing vital details, best try to take in all that is said, and you will be able to weigh the options at the end and choose the right one. You do get some time at the end of each to fill in answers, but not a lot.
The answer sheet is the only one that counts at pens-down, but you can write on the exam paper too if it helps. I underlined a few key words to look out for. I found it useful to cross out options that were definitely disproven to make it easier to see what options were left. If you mark your answers in on the exam paper before transferring to the hoja de respuestas, you reduce the chance of getting half way through an exercise and realising you were one column off and have filled in the wrong meaningless little multiple-choice boxes and no longer know what the right answers were to fix it. Still, be on guard against running out of time. I transferred my answers during the test when I could spare a few seconds, not only at the end since I didn’t want some slip to get in the way of completing the answer sheet. Always practice within the allotted time.
Some actors in the audio have full-on Argentinian or Columbian accents and the setting can be anywhere in the Spanish-speaking world, so it helps to be familiar with the accents and with the big city names of Latin America and associated adjectives.
My score for the prueba auditiva was 93%, meaning I got 28 out of 30 questions right. For me, having a technique for this part was crucial, and also acts as a back-up to the Oral, since that’s the highest stress part which – like a driving test – can go very wrong on the day itself. I realised that I could have done a fair bit worse in the Oral and still passed, thanks to a much better grade in its pair, the listening.
More on the grouping/compensating in Part 1. My notes on the Oral exam will follow in Part 3.
NB: Photos are from various test papers done in preparation, not the actual exam!