While I personally have little interest in taking a CEFR test, and don't care about them too much (although the scale is a useful benchmark in absence of /compared to, other scales), there is something I have been wondering about for a long time, given that they seem to have a low pass bar of 50%. So here's the question: Is it possible to pass a C1 barely, i.e. with a 50% score, and yet not be able at the same time to get a top score on the B2 test for the same language? I realize most people who take multiple tests for a language do so over time and thus their results would not be useful for comparison. But my question above assumes someone took both a B2 and C1 test at virtually the same time, i.e. testing the same current state of knowledge.
There's not strictly such a thing as "a CEFR test", but there are many CEFR-aligned tests. In most cases, tests from a single provider get increasingly more difficult, and are built on the same principles. I would think at B2 vs C1 for the same exam provider a difference of 30-40% wouldn't be unreasonable (some of my students can handle being given an overly hard exam for practice purposes, others can't). Getting top marks on any language test is a matter of luck, though. Hardly any examiners publish official wordlists, so it's pure chance whether you know all the words you need or not. Heck, I wouldn't be able to get 100% in the Cambridge Advanced English exam -- I've never seen a past paper that didn't test at least one word or idiom that I'd never heard before....
Cainntear, Thanks for the distinction about CEFR-aligned tests. So that would mean my question would have to be posed individually to each group of tests for each given language. Still I would think they are roughly comparable between languages, as in the jump in difficulty from one language to another. The question to be answered before the one I posed can be, is precisely how big of a jump there is between B2 and C1. If your speculation about 30-40% is correct, then mathematically C1=1.4B2 and the minimal grade for C1 of 50% =.5*1.4B2=.7B2, which is higher than the 50% passing grade for B2, which means one could barely pass the C1 while at the same time not getting top marks on the B2. Since CEFR apparently intentionally won't align CEFR levels with vocabulary levels in the various languages, then the most objective metric is unavailable, officially at least. I am aware of a wordlist for German, which is for purchase but very expensive (around US$65 IIRC), and which presumably is for the use of course designers. From my use of wordlists for various courses for the same stated CEFR levels (which are often freely available on the net apart from the courses themselves), I can say there is a lot of overlap, but also an awful lot that is unique to each course, and beyond the vocabulary used for telling stories/situations.
