JCAT
Website: http://www.j-cat.org/
The JCAT is a great alternative to the JLPT for the purposes of testing and benchmarking your Japanese skills for your own benefit. It’s a very rigorous test, and unlike the JLPT there are no levels; the test self-adjusts the difficulty of the questions as you go based on which questions you pass and fail in order to accurately assess your knowledge in the various testing areas (language knowledge, reading comprehension, and listening comprehension), before giving you an overall score.
Unfortunately, the JCAT is not widely recognized, and so while you can put your score on your resume if so inclined, not many people will know what it is or grant it much weight, so the JCAT is most useful as a personal assessment. However, the score can be roughly correlated to the different levels of the JLPT, so the JCAT can be used to see which level of the JLPT would be a good target for you.
We would recommend that everyone try the JCAT at least once. It’s free and you can take it on your own time, so there’s nothing to lose. One point to note is that once you take it, you can’t take it again for six months (just like the JLPT, but you’re not restricted to July and December). This means you can take it once every JLPT cycle as a benchmark or for test practice.
The JCAT is a great alternative to the JLPT for the purposes of testing and benchmarking your Japanese skills for your own benefit. It’s a very rigorous test, and unlike the JLPT there are no levels; the test self-adjusts the difficulty of the questions as you go based on which questions you pass and fail in order to accurately assess your knowledge in the various testing areas (language knowledge, reading comprehension, and listening comprehension), before giving you an overall score.
Unfortunately, the JCAT is not widely recognized, and so while you can put your score on your resume if so inclined, not many people will know what it is or grant it much weight, so the JCAT is most useful as a personal assessment. However, the score can be roughly correlated to the different levels of the JLPT, so the JCAT can be used to see which level of the JLPT would be a good target for you.
We would recommend that everyone try the JCAT at least once. It’s free and you can take it on your own time, so there’s nothing to lose. One point to note is that once you take it, you can’t take it again for six months (just like the JLPT, but you’re not restricted to July and December). This means you can take it once every JLPT cycle as a benchmark or for test practice.