Woof, my HSK Mock was a wakeup call.

Did quite good on the free HSK test material I tried some days ago. Not so good on the official HSK Mock I shelled 10 usd for. Wow, the listening is harder than I expected for HSK5, though I did better than I thought. The time limit wasn't so bad on listening and writing, but it really felt tight for my speed of reading - I only got to question 82 before I ran out of time on that one.

In any case, I have exactly 2 weeks to prepare, and I still think passing the HSK5 is realistic, considering I might (just barely) pass this one, once the writing section is graded. My essays were pretty poor, says 2 LLMs and my own judgement. All of my regular study is focused on input, so production is weak. I read books, make flashcards from the books, and watch some TV series. So I think ahead of my exam on the 24th I should try and write a lot, maybe 300 characters a day. I am also going to look over the HSK 5标准教程 books and do the excercises in there.

In any case, I've mostly just shared here, but i'm interested in feedback or advice too, on how to prepare.

Huh.  That's not that bad, right?  (I kind of want to say "congratulations!")  But yeah, the past exams you end up encountering online are much easier (it's a bit of a trap).  Here's my HSK5 post over at Reddit if you want to see what I did.

Thank you. I will make use of at least a couple things from your post, starting with making a sentence from every word in the word list.

I did pass this mock after the grade came back for writing, just a 190, but still that is nice  

226 on my HSK Mock last night - awesome.

I feel like my essays were better, but they got worse grades. Like Becky noted, I don't think anyone is reading them, and I don't know what the point of human marking is if they don't even give a few short words of feedback eg., “语法有错” or “不能这样用’比起‘“.