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If you have taken or are preparing to take a CEFR exam, how much time did you spend explicitly preparing for the exam?

luke wrote:If you have taken or are preparing to take a CEFR exam, how much time did you spend explicitly preparing for the exam?

I spent about two weeks preparing for a C2 exam in French back in 2015.

Explicitly for the exam? I suppose you mean activities on top of studying we'd be doing without the exam, activities specifically for it?
Or do you mean the period of time over which we were preparing?

DELF B2: none at all. I was preparing for the high school leaving exam back than, but it had a very different format and was significantly easier. But probably the preparation served them both. I had been one of the best three French learners in my class, the other two had experience with studying in the language, so I was well above the expected level. At the DELFB2, I barely passed.

CAE: 4 hours? there was a short "preparatory course" at my highschool but the quality was quite dubious, as not only you can fit very little into 4 hours, but the whole time was spent on stuff you could read in a book. And I finished English Grammar in Use, explicitely for the exam, so that was perhaps 10 hours, as most had been done before for school. So, 14 hours total?

DALF C2: not sure how many hours were spent with the tutor, like 15? There was surely a 20 option but I think I chose 15 in the end, due to money. +Approximately 0.5-2 hours of writing before each lesson. (I should have been doing much more, but there is only so much you can do in the medicine exam time. Both DALF terms fall into the exam times). On top of that, perhaps 5 hours of explicit grammar review and practice before the exam, I should have been doing much more. And 5-10 hours of other studying with the exam on mind, like reading the writing genre definitions in courses and tips on how to write them, and such stuff. So, it was something like 50 hours, I suppose.

But bear in mind that both before the CAE and DALFC2, I had been reading and watching tv series a lot already, therefore there was little point in the listening or reading practice exercises, those were quite easy. Before starting my CAE preparation, I also had quite a lot of writing experience, thanks to a rpg game with extra on forum writing, that prepared me really well (my only C2 graded part in the exam).

If I could send letters to my past selves before the exams:
DELF B2: Get a damn preparatory book and do all the exercises, and do much more listening, buy the damn Progressive books and finish them. That would have probably taken 50-100 h, and could have easily given me at least 20 more points.
CAE: Get a damn preparatory book,do it all, focus the most on Use of English. On top of Grammar in Use, do the Vocab and Idiom books by the same publisher. That could have taken like 30h, and could have improved the grade in at least two parts out of the 4 not C2 ones.
DALF C2:Use all the resources you've got to the last bit, do tons of grammar exercises, write at least 1 long text per day and spend another hour reviewing one of the previous ones. That would have taken at least 300h during the last three or four months.

I all the three cases, I didn't have such an amount of additional time to invest anyways, but the ideal would have surely been putting in at least four or five times as many hours than I actually did.

Finnish C1: zero. Well, maybe I watched a bit more TV in Finland than I would have otherwise.

B1 TELC German - about 4x4 hrs - mostly doing sample tests and writing exercises.
B2 TELC German - Current prep 10 x 2 hrs + 2 x 8 hrs - first part most just vocabulary review and intensive reading. Second part planned samples tests and exercises.

For my KER Esperanto C1 exam I'm averaging one hour per day. I started this at the end of April and will continue till 10 June when the exam is. After that I'm switching over to BCS.