What is the Spanish SL exam like?

[Penguinluvr]

What is the Spanish SL exam like? What grade did the majority in your class get? 4? 5? 6? 7? I'm really nervous right now because my Spanish teacher literally prepped us for nothing this whole school year

[TheNintendoChip]

I'm a gringo and got a 7. Pretty much everyone in my class last year got a 7, there was around 60 of us. A couple got 6s, and I only heard of one 5. Now, 10 of us were Juniors and the other 50 or so were Seniors. IB Spanish, for us, is normally divided into two years, but you can take the test as a Junior if you really want to. 

Now I really didn't want to take Spanish for one year, because I was pretty terrible at it (I remember at the beginning of the school year, I pretty much only knew the present and some of the past tense, and my vocabulary was extremely limited). At my school, however, we only have 6 classes a year so we have to take at least one (and at most 2) IB exam(s) in our Junior year. That meant that I had to take IB Spanish in my Junior year, and skip a year of Spanish. As a Senior now, I can assure you that I missed A LOT of information because of this.

The exam is two papers: Paper 1 and 2 (who would've guessed? ). Paper 1 is reading-comprehension based -- you'll be given 4 passages and have to answer a variety of questions on these. Some of them could be finding synonyms of words in the passages, some require you to complete the sentence, some you have to fill in a blank in the passage itself with the correct connector, etc. My paper 1 wasn't that bad, but there was an entire passage I messed up because I didn't know my body parts. In Paper 2, you'll be given 5 prompts, one from each of the following topics: Cultural Diversity, Customs and Traditions, Health, Leisure, and Science and Technology. Remember how I said I skipped a year? This is where it hurt the most because I only knew information to be able to answer the first two topics, so I was screwed if I didn't understand either of them. For Paper 2, you need to make sure you're answering the prompt correctly and in the right tense; Keep time frames, roles, etc. in mind when writing it. Paper 2 also requires knowledge of various formats. I really hope you've at least gone over a couple of them. They're not really that hard to memorize, and you get 5 marks just for having the format right, 10 for grammar, and 10 for your message.