C2-3

[pne]

Our company is offering courses in Business English.

To enable employees to assess their level of English a bit more objectively, they sent around a link to an online test which starts at a low level and lets you go to successively higher levels as long as you get enough points on the previous one.

I decided to take the test, too, partly for a lark but also partly because I'm not too confident on my Business English specifically; after all, it's not the sort of thing you learn at home or school.

The test told me that my score corresponded to level C2-3 (i.e. at the top [3 of 3 sub-levels] of level C2), "interpreter level". Well, well, well.

(FWIW, my self-assessment before I started the test was C2 for passive knowledge [listening, reading] and C1 for active knowledge [speaking, writing], mostly because I'm unsure whether I can capture the full breadth of stylistic variation they called for in their brief description of each level.)

Comments

[fledchen.livejournal.com]

I wonder how I, as a native speaker of English, would score on something like that.

My formal education in the mechanics of my native language is woefully inadequate, and I have zero "business" English training.

[pne.livejournal.com]

I think that you'd probably do fine; there was absolutely no formal part to it (sentence diagramming, 'what part of speech is this', or anything like it) -- just reading and listening comprehension and fill-in-the-blank in a sentence (where you go by what sounds most natural, something that native speakers excel at, rather than by what's an adverb vs. an adjective or whatever) and the like.

Give it a try if you'd like; surprisingly (for me), the test is not on the company's Intranet but is accessible from the public Internet. The URL is http://gt.telekom.de/englishtest2004/html/start.htm, which opens a pop-up page http://gt.telekom.de/englishtest2004/html/intro.htm (so perhaps you'd prefer to start there).

It may not work on anything that's not Internet Explorer; I had difficulties in the pre-test practice questions using Firefox so I switched to MSIE for the test.