Methodology: how the HSK placement tests work

HSK

Hànyǔ Shuǐpíng Kǎoshì, the Chinese Proficiency Test for learners of Chinese as a second language.

CTI

CTI Co., Ltd., the company that organizes the HSK according to its HSK page. Older pages on the same site carry the name Chinese Testing International in their footer (for example the 2009 introduction to the new HSK).

CLEC

Center for Language Education and Cooperation (中外语言交流合作中心), the publisher of the 2025 HSK exam syllabus.

GF 0025-2021

The national standard Chinese Proficiency Grading Standards for International Chinese Language Education (《国际中文教育中文水平等级标准》), released in 2021 by China's Ministry of Education and State Language Commission. It defines nine levels and 11,092 words (standard PDF, Ministry Q&A).

2025 HSK exam syllabus

CLEC's 《中文水平考试 HSK 考试大纲》 (PDF), published in November 2025 with an implementation date of July 2026. The new nine-level exam follows it. Its word list has 11,000 entries and differs from the GF 0025-2021 list.

HSK 2.0

Informal name for the six-level HSK (HSK 1–6) launched in 2009.

HSK 3.0

Informal name for the newer "three stages, nine levels" HSK: Elementary (Levels 1–3), Intermediate (4–6), and Advanced (7–9, one combined band).

HSKK

The HSK Speaking Test (HSKK), a separate speaking exam in the six-level system.

Band

One level's slice of a word list. The HSK 2.0 test has seven bands (HSK 1–6 and Beyond); the HSK 3.0 test has seven (Levels 1–6 and Levels 7–9).

Beyond

The HSK 2.0 test's band above HSK 6: 12 words from the GF 0025-2021 Levels 7–9 list. It does not come from the 2025 HSK exam syllabus.

Stratified sample

A sample drawn separately from each band, so every level is represented instead of mostly easy or mostly hard words.

Mastery

Words you marked known ÷ words sampled from one band. Skipped words count as unknown.

HSK 2.0 test

• HSK 1–6 bands: the HSK 2.0 new-word lists (only the words each level adds) from complete-hsk-vocabulary by drkameleon (MIT license).
• Beyond band: the same dataset's Levels 7–9 list. Its README says its nine-level lists come from elkmovie/hsk30 (MIT), an OCR extraction of the GF 0025-2021 PDF. So the Beyond words come from the GF 0025-2021 Levels 7–9 list, not from the 2025 HSK exam syllabus.
• Version: sampled on 2026-09-20 with random seed 42. The upstream commit used for this sample was not recorded. The list has not changed since the test launched on 2026-09-22.
• The bundled data includes English glosses derived from CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0). The test shows characters and pinyin only.

HSK 3.0 test

• Word list and levels: the vocabulary list (词汇表, PDF pp. 80–354) of the 2025 HSK exam syllabus, 11,000 numbered entries. File SHA-256 ec74ce04…45504941, fetched 2026-09-26. We extracted it from the PDF's text layer and checked it against a second, independent extraction; all 11,000 rows agree. The PDF text has no license statement; we link the original and use the list only to choose and label test items.
• Pinyin spelling and glosses: complete-hsk-vocabulary at commit 7ac65bf (MIT), used only when its pinyin matches the syllabus. Glosses come from CC-CEDICT (CC BY-SA 4.0). The test shows characters and pinyin only.

HSK 2.0 test: 120 words, fixed

A stratified sample of 120 words, shown as the same words in the same order on every run. The order was mixed once when the list was built, so levels are interleaved rather than easy to hard.

• HSK 1: 15 words
• HSK 2: 15 words
• HSK 3: 18 words
• HSK 4: 20 words
• HSK 5: 20 words
• HSK 6: 20 words
• Beyond HSK 6: 12 words (GF 0025-2021 Levels 7–9)

HSK 3.0 test: 119 words, new each run

Items come from a 575-word pool: 80 words each for Levels 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6, 75 for Level 2 (the syllabus adds only 200 entries at Level 2, and 75 survive the filters), and 100 for Levels 7–9. The pool leaves out word forms the syllabus lists more than once (such as 还 hái/huán), items of four or more characters, proper nouns, particles, interjections, idioms, abbreviations and bound morphemes, and words without a dictionary reading that matches the syllabus pinyin. Within each level, items are picked at even steps through a frequency ranking, from common to rarer.

Each run draws 17 per band at random, 119 words in total, and interleaves them so every stretch of the test touches every band. The drawn words are saved with your session, so reloading the results page shows the same result.

Both tests use the same rules on their own bands:

1. If Level 1 (HSK 1) mastery is under 50%, the result is below Level 1.
2. You reach level N when every lower band is at 80% or more and band N itself is at 65% or more.
3. The check climbs from level 1 and stops at the first level that fails.
4. At the top: HSK 6 plus 55% or more on Beyond gives "HSK 6+ (approaching 7–9)" on the HSK 2.0 test. Level 6 plus 55% or more on the Levels 7–9 band gives "HSK 7–9 range" on the HSK 3.0 test.

The HSK 3.0 test labels results with the official stage names (Elementary, Intermediate, Advanced).

Why lower bands need 80%. Take HSK 1 at 100%, HSK 2 at 87% (13/15), HSK 3 at 78% (14/18) and HSK 4 at 75% (15/20). HSK 3 passes: the lower bands are above 80% and HSK 3 is above 65%. HSK 4 fails because HSK 3 is under 80%, even though the HSK 4 band alone looks fine. The result is HSK 3. Gaps lower down block a higher claim, so the next step is to fill them.

For a walkthrough of the results screen, see How to Read Your HSK Placement Result.

Both results pages show a secondary "rough recognition size". For each counted band it multiplies your mastery by an assumed band size and adds the results, rounded:

rough size = Σ (mastery in band × band size), over counted bands

HSK 2.0 band sizes are the new words per level implied by the cumulative counts in the 2009 introduction (150, 300, 600, 1,200, 2,500, 5,000). The Beyond size is rounded; GF 0025-2021 adds 5,636 words across Levels 7–9. HSK 3.0 band sizes are the new entries per level in the 2025 syllabus.

Cap. Only bands up to one level above your placement count, so lucky clicks on much harder words can't inflate the figure:

• Below HSK 1: HSK 1 only
• HSK N (1–5): HSK 1 through HSK N+1
• HSK 6: HSK 1–6 plus Beyond
• HSK 6+ (approaching 7–9): all bands

The HSK 3.0 test works the same way: below Level 1 counts Level 1 only, Level N counts Levels 1 through N+1, Level 6 adds the Levels 7–9 band, and the 7–9 range counts everything. Because a single click in a large band moves the total a lot, the figure is a side note and never decides your level. A worked example is in Chinese Vocabulary Size vs HSK Level.

• They measure self-reported recognition only: whether you say you know a word when you see it. They do not test listening, speaking, writing, reading speed, or grammar.
• A result is not an official exam score and cannot be used as proof of level. Official scores come from sittings registered through CTI or an authorized test center.
• Samples are small. The HSK 2.0 test repeats the same 120 words, so a quick retake mostly measures memory. The HSK 3.0 test draws new words each run, so results can move near a threshold.
• Overconfident "Know" answers raise the result; strict answers lower it.
• Chinese Copilot is not affiliated with CTI or CLEC.

• 2026-09-26: Published this page. The HSK 2.0 test's Beyond band is now labeled as the GF 0025-2021 Levels 7–9 sample (the words did not change).
• 2026-09-26: The rough vocabulary figure on both tests now counts only bands up to one level above your placement.
• 2026-09-26: The HSK 3.0 test's word pool switched from GF 0025-2021 lists to the 2025 HSK exam syllabus word list.
• 2026-09-26: Launched the separate HSK 3.0 test. The HSK 2.0 results page stopped showing an approximate HSK 3.0 label and links to the HSK 3.0 test instead.
• 2026-09-22: Launched the HSK 2.0 test with the fixed 120-word sample and the thresholds above (50%, 80%, 65%, 55%), unchanged since.