104 questions · 180 minutes · 300 points
Listening: 50 questions, 60 minutes, 100 points.
Writing: 4 questions, 50 minutes, 100 points (two fill-in questions plus a 300-character and a 700-character essay).
Reading: 50 questions, 70 minutes, 100 points.
The exam runs in two sessions with a break.
Level 3: 120+ · Level 4: 150+ · Level 5: 190+ · Level 6: 230+ (out of 300).
Writing (questions 53–54) decides most scores — learn the essay template and practice with past prompts. In Reading, time is the enemy: train yourself to answer the first 25 questions quickly to bank time for the harder second half.
TOPIK II is sat in two parts on the same day. The first session is Listening, 50 questions in 60 minutes, followed immediately by Writing, 4 questions in 50 minutes — 110 minutes without leaving your seat. After a break comes the second session: Reading, 50 questions in 70 minutes. Each of the three sections is worth 100 points and the paper totals 300.
The shape of that first session matters more than most candidates expect. Writing arrives at the end of nearly two hours of concentration, and question 54, the essay, is worth 50 points on its own. Anyone who has never practised writing an essay while already tired is training for a different exam than the one they will sit.
Fifty questions in sixty minutes, played once. The first third resembles a harder TOPIK I: short exchanges, a picture to match, a plan to identify. The middle brings interviews and workplace conversations. The last third is where the section is won or lost — lectures, debates and documentary extracts, often with two questions attached to one long recording.
For those paired questions, read both stems before the audio begins. Knowing that one asks for the speaker's attitude and the other for a specific detail changes what you listen for, and you only get one pass.
Questions 51 and 52 give a short text with two blanks and are worth 10 points each. They test grammar and register, not creativity: a notice on a noticeboard needs the polite formal ending, a message to a friend does not. Marks here are cheap and predictable, and they are the last thing anyone should leave blank.
Question 53 is worth 30 points and asks for 200 to 300 characters describing data — a chart, a survey result, a trend. It has a formula: state what the data shows, give the numbers, state the change, state the reason or consequence. Learning that formula is worth more marks per hour of study than anything else in TOPIK II.
Question 54 is the essay: 600 to 700 characters, 50 points, on an abstract prompt such as the value of competition or the role of failure. It is marked on content, organisation and language use together. A well-organised essay in simple, correct Korean scores higher than an ambitious one full of half-remembered grammar.
Fifty questions in seventy minutes, and unlike Listening you control the order. The section runs from grammar-in-context items through advertisements and news headlines to long expository passages, with the hardest material clustered at the end.
The headline questions deserve separate practice. Korean news headlines compress a sentence into a few nouns and a punctuation mark, and reading them is a distinct skill that does not come free with general reading ability.
Level 3 needs 120 of 300, Level 4 needs 150, Level 5 needs 190 and Level 6 needs 230. The level comes from the total, so there is no minimum in any single section.
That arithmetic is worth planning around. A candidate at 140 who needs Level 4 does not need to improve everywhere — ten more marks on question 53, which is a learnable formula, may be the shortest path to the number.