I took the exam at Leiria yesterday (March 11th). A couple of additions to the report above:
I mentioned to the staff that I had hearing issues, and they were happy to move me to the front of the room. During the initial section of the Oral comprehension test (when you are listening to the instructions), they also checked with me to make sure I could hear everything, which was very nice. In general the staff were great and seemed anxious to give you the best shot they could.
As in Chris’s exam, our exam had extracts from “Portugeses no Mundo”; there were two that were directly from that podcast and one that was very similar, so it was very good study tip. It’s available within the RTP Play app for free, if you need to find it.
The final bit of our Oral was particularly difficult because there were 10 texts and 10 responses. You listened to each text twice and then matched it to the most appropriate response. For timing reasons, they suggested you mark in the book and then fill in the folha de respostas post-facto (there was time set aside for this). This was very difficult even if you understood all the vocabulary, because several of the responses could have been used in multiple of the situations given in the texts. Until you had heard all of the texts, it was really hard to judge “most appropriate”. When I went to put the noted selections onto the response sheet, I had used one of them three times and two were unused. Obviously not correct, but very difficult to recall them to make any adjustments. It was also slightly confusing because the test sheet numbers and the response sheet numbers didn’t match (one was a continuation of the full set of questions, and the other treated it as subsections of a single question).
The oral production one depends a great deal on who you get partnered with. In my case, I wasn’t able to identify the person with the same time (he had come with his wife, and they left for lunch right after the initial section) in advance. If you can, it is definitely worth it, as I didn’t have much time to adjust myself to his accent, which was quite different from a native speaker’s. This may be more of an issue for me because of the hearing problems, but early practice with your partner would probably generally good.
During the oral production section we were asked questions about ourselves, given a picture to describe, then asked to jointly choose a weekend activity from five given in pictures. The picture was easy and the questions about myself mostly easy (One was ‘How did you get your job?’ and the actual answer is so complicated that I froze for a while trying to boil it down into something less than 20 minutes long.) If there are common questions about your day-to-day life that have complicated answers, preparing a few simplified answers before the test could be useful.
The “choose a weekend activity” actually went quite badly because we started talking during the allocated prep time and then had to go back and restart. We bobbled that a bit by starting in different places and ultimately we ran out of time (doing the actual selection after the allocated time was over). The marks there will depend a lot on whether they see the full recording and count all of it or get only the video within the allocated time.
Despite the stress, it was a pretty positive experience, because it really reinforced that they want you to pass either in this try or in some later try. It felt encouraging, rather than an attempt to exclude you by making the test hard.
Not a great one, in my opinion.