The Japan Foundation has released the statistics for the December 2012 JLPT, which you can see by clicking this link http://www.jlpt.jp/e/statistics/archive/201202.html

The data shows some really interesting results. The first thing I noticed was the drop in people who passed from previous exams, particularly in N1 and N2. This makes me think that the difficulty of the exam was much higher this time than in the past. Unfortunately they haven't released the detailed data yet so we can't compare average scores or check the bell-curve charts.

Thoughts?

[Zgarbas]

The N2 pass rate actually increased, tho.
It went from 104,240/37,374 passed to 89,402/33,536 passed.

(I wonder why Overseas has a higher pass rate for the N4&N3 than the Japan exams.)

Zgarbas Wrote:The N2 pass rate actually increased, tho.
It went from 104,240/37,374 passed to 89,402/33,536 passed.

(I wonder why Overseas has a higher pass rate for the N4&N3 than the Japan exams.)

Compared to July it was down however. But I suppose you could attribute this to the higher proportion of people taking the exam in Japan/Asia. Still I would say a change of 2% is to be expected, but almost 13% for N1 is quite high.

[Zgarbas]

Ah, i was comparing it to the December tests though. The July tests are mostly for learners from/in Asia and areas which get a high enough number of participants, so imho it's expected that they'd have a higher pass rate.

SendaiDan Wrote:This makes me think that the difficulty of the exam was much higher this time than in the past.

Your score depends on how the other examinees did, so that differences in exam difficulty are cancelled out.

Really interesting statistics. The number of N1/N2 test takers dropped noticeably from 2011, which matches what I saw in terms of activity on this forum and other sites (e.g. # of posts in the 2011 JLPT thread vs # of posts in the 2012 JLPT thread).

What I find interesting is that the pass rate for N1 fell significantly. Within Japan: 35.4% ⇒ 26.4% = ⇓25.4% (relative), Outside Japan: 30.2% ⇒ 23.1% = ⇓23.5% (relative). So there were fewer N1 test takers in 2012 and they did noticeably worse by a good margin. Ostensibly the point of the mark scaling was to even out difficulty between test years, based on the assumption that the average "skill" in each year's test takers is about the same. If that assumption were true then we shouldn't be seeing such significant changes in pass rates in just one year.

Guoguodi Wrote:Really interesting statistics. The number of N1/N2 test takers dropped noticeably from 2011, which matches what I saw in terms of activity on this forum and other sites (e.g. # of posts in the 2011 JLPT thread vs # of posts in the 2012 JLPT thread).

What I find interesting is that the pass rate for N1 fell significantly. Within Japan: 35.4% ⇒ 26.4% = ⇓25.4% (relative), Outside Japan: 30.2% ⇒ 23.1% = ⇓23.5% (relative). So there were fewer N1 test takers in 2012 and they did noticeably worse by a good margin. Ostensibly the point of the mark scaling was to even out difficulty between test years, based on the assumption that the average "skill" in each year's test takers is about the same. If that assumption were true then we shouldn't be seeing such significant changes in pass rates in just one year.

This is what I thought too. I just read on the Japan Foundation website about the scaled scoring system they use. The whole purpose they say is to eliminate the differences in exam difficulty seen across multiple exams. Even if one person has a higher number of actual correct scores they can receive a lower scaled score similar to a person who actually answered less answers correctly all based on their answering patterns (seems a bit unfair to me but anyway...) If this is the case and the December 2012 exam was indeed more difficult, surely once the scores are scaled the percentage of people passing the exam should be similar.

Have they released a breakdown of score distributions and percentiles? This report already increased my pride for passing n1 but now I'm curious to see how the scores were distributed.

For those interested the link in the OP has been updated with the full breakdown of the results.

As we saw before there were some dramatic drops in the pass rates all around (except for N5 in Japan and N2 overseas). In particular the N1 and N3 pass rates plummeted.

Distribution of the scaled scores changed a lot too with many more scores landing further towards the left - my score of 119 (we'll say 120) on the N1 would've put me in the 77th / 83.4 / 81.7 percentile for japan/overseas/average in July, but was in the 88th / 88.4 / 88.5 percentile for the same in December. Similar story with N2 N3.

It's very evident that these tests were much harder than the ones in July. Be proud if you passed.