He aprobado el DELE! (I passed the DELE exam!)

Just wanted to share a bit of good news. I just found out this morning that I passed the DELE exam at the C1 level! If you are unfamiliar with DELE (or Diplomas de Español como Lengua Extranjera), it's a certification given by the Instituto Cervantes with the goal of spreading the Spanish language around the world, and is recognized by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport of Spain.

I'm really excited that I passed. It was a hard test, and I had no expectations either way. What I was surprised by, though, were that my worst sections were in reading and writing (I thought my worst would be in speaking, but turned out to be my best section).

Just for the sake of completeness, I've shown my results below.

Basically, your exam score is broken out into two groups (group 1: reading+writing, group 2: speaking+listening). Each individual test is scored on a scale of 25. In order to get a score of Pass (or "Apto"), you need to get a combined score of 30/50 in each group. I got a 32.5 in group 1 and a 43.3 in group 2. So as you can see, my skills are definitely skewed.

My scores were as follows (in English):

• Written expression and interaction: 15/25 points. Barely passed.
• Reading comprehension: 17.5/25 points. Passed.
• Listening comprehension: 19.17/25 points. Comfortably passed.
• Oral expression and interaction: 24.13/25 points. Near perfect.

At some point I want to give an analysis of how I thought the exam went and compare it to my actual results. I also want to provide some helpful tips for DELE exam hopefuls!

Stay tuned.