Five inburgering exam myths, tested against real exams

A lot of people preparing for the inburgeringsexamen run into advice: “pick the longest answer”, “choose B if you are stuck”, “expect it to get harder as you go up a level”. Most of it is passed on in good faith. Almost none of it has ever been checked. Inburgeringscursus.nl coded 881 questions from 35 official exam sets – three years of the Staatsexamen NT2 plus the DUO practice exams.

Here are the myths that came up most often:

“Pick the answer with words you recognise from the text”
This is the most repeated piece of exam advice there is and it does not hold up against the data. We checked it on 288 reading questions. In four of them there was exactly one option that shared words with the text. The rest of the time it pointed at two or three answers at once.

The reason is simple once you see it. The most common wrong answer quotes the text accurately and then answers a different question. Both the right answer and the wrong ones borrow words from the passage, roughly 86% against 95%. A feature that shows up in nearly every option cannot tell them apart.

“Answer B is more often correct”
This one looked real. Across 176 items B came up more often than chance and it held up under statistical checking. So we tested it on all the available exams and there it landed at 31.7%. That is what guessing gets you.

Even if it had been true, it would not have helped. Answering B every time scores between 10 and 19 points across the six exams we measured. The pass mark is 24. It does not pass a single one. So when in doubt, choosing “B” is not the safe bet.

“The exam gets steadily harder from A2 to B1 to B2”
Half true. The half that is wrong matters if you are planning your study time.
A2 really is a different exam from B1. But B1 and B2 do not separate cleanly. The individual exams overlap, and the gap between them is relatively small.

There are two groups here, not three steps on a ladder. Moving from B1 to B2 is a smaller jump than the label suggests. Moving from A2 to B1 is the real one.

“The reading exam is the same task from start to finish”
Not true, and this is the most useful thing we found. It applies to the Staatsexamen NT2 at B1 and B2 level.

Above every reading text sits one line of instruction. Five of them say roughly the same thing: “Answer the question”. The last one says something different: “read the question first, then find the answer in the text”.

That line appeared on the final text of every exam we looked at, 34 items out of 34, across six exams at B1 and B2. And there the answer sits almost word for word in the text 47% of the time. Everywhere else it is 9%. The exam board is telling you to stop reading and start searching.

One warning. It is not the easy section. Half-correct answers appear twice as often there, 24% against 12%. In 13 of those 34 items the information you need sits in two separate articles. The difficulty moves from understanding to locating. Searching faster without checking is how you walk into it.

“KNM is mostly about Dutch customs and etiquette”
Not really. KNM covers eight themes across 40 questions, and they are nowhere near equal in size. Work and income runs to eight or nine questions. Institutions get seven. Together they are about 40% of the exam. Manners and education get three each.

This held across all official practice exams. It tells you where to start, not where to stop. Those two themes leave 60% elsewhere, and the pass mark is well above that.

Why we counted all this
Patterns like these are only useful if you can practise them. That is what Inburgeringscursus.nl is for: an online course for the inburgeringsexamen and the Staatsexamen NT2. The platform is built on this research so you practice exactly what the real exams ask of you.

It covers all five parts at A2, B1 and B2. It starts with theory on what each part asks, then you move on to practice questions that follow the real patterns and finally the mock exams. These mock exams are timed and marked on the official criteria. The practice never runs out either. You generate new questions yourself whenever you want them, on exactly the points you keep getting wrong. This way you can practise until you know you are ready instead of hoping you are.