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HSK6 in 2018. Aced writing and listening. Reading at like 55%. Given my minimal amount of time to actual study and total classroom time of three months, I guess it is what was to be expected and I should be happy with it. Never happy with my Mandarin journey and basically stopped once I went to running my school, and once I went to international school teaching as interactions with computers and technology became more difficult and I stopped everything.. 

I'm in Jinan, and the HSK6 exam (3.0 [2025] standards; trial run) is in two days.  They sent me an email saying there's a mock exam tomorrow.  It seems they want to have a trial run of the new system.  So I plan to do that too.

(Edit: The trial run was the same as chinestest.cn -> HSK3.0 -> Sample questions.  However, it was useful for finding the venue, and getting the timing right.)

(Edit 2: Took the exam; I put my write-up on Reddit.)

I did the first 3.0[2025]-standards HSKMock HSK6 exam, and my marks were okay (I posted about it on Reddit), but my timing wasn't great.  The exam is much shorter, so I don't spend the entire writing section thinking "I need to pee".  It'll be my first computer exam (I've only done the handwritten one previously).

I haven't been studying all that hard recently, mostly because I'm tired of doing exam after exam.  I kind of want my language abilities to be more meaningful than "I did well on an exam".

I'm guessing I'm not the only one here taking the trial 3.0[2025] exam on the 31st.

The HSK 3.0 trial exam results came out today.  These are my HSK6 marks:

Obviously, I'm absolutely thrilled with how things turned out.  I note that a 240 on the HSK6 officially corresponds to a HSK7 (source) :

Quote

HSK（七级）水平对应HSK（六级）240分及以上。

HSK test taken, and the experience was WEIRD!

Hi all,

I took the HSK5 test yesterday essentially just to know what the test would be like. I had not really studied properly at all, and the result may have been about 10% to 20% depending on how well I guessed at the MCQs. I often tried to get a sense of mood even if not specific content for questions.
(Summary: I'm a somewhat wasteful student, but money and opportunity cost of going to an exam are no objects to me. Plus I had passed HSK4 on 3rd attempt with my progressive mindset.)

The 5及考试 had a weird aspect, whereby after the listening section was complete, 5 minutes were expected to be spent on reviewing listening and, if the student had opted not to do this it as he/she handled each question, transcribe the answer to the mark sense sheet. One student prudently asked "我们可以花那个5分时间预习阅读部分吗？“ and the invigilator said no, it was strictly pencils down. The student asked ”不过，我愿意不写，但是还可以至少看看阅读问题吗“ and the invigilator said no.

So, when this time came, everyone was twiddling thumbs, wondering what to do with themselves. Everyone wanted to dot the mark sense sheet as time went by and they sure as sure didn't want to second guess their answers based on audio content that was long gone into the ether. Is this a standard HSK5 experience? I did see that one person looked at the reading anyway but the invigilator turned their page back saying they had to wait.
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The other thing that was really weird was that the invigilation was all done in English. Now hear me out, I'm not a standards officer, but each of the 3 times I took the HSK4 test the mode of instruction was Chinese. This time it was all English. It was run under the auspices of the Confucius Institute. My nation does not have an official language. Even when I told the invigilator that I was a Chinese speaker there were attempts to ignore this and it was awkward as I explained this could be nipped in the bud. If I were to socialize with the invigilator in a café I would use English as the de facto language, but this was an environment where students were highly inferably adept at Chinese well beyond a baseline, and Chinese proficiency was furthermore their aim.

I grant that the Confucius Institutes are no longer strongly supervised and have been left to run laissez-faire by whoever has kept the job after Beijing (essentially) offloaded them.

I think this is a big deal because if CI people consider it neither their job nor civic duty to advocate for Chinese communicability, they miss an opportunity to nuture the developing generation of students.

Chinese language ostracism by people who actually speak Chinese is a widespread issue, perhaps worthy of its own post (though it can get very ideological, very burn-after-reading 感觉).

Anyway, I hope this feedback has proven interesting. I look forward to fielding genuine responses. Thanks all!