DTZ Practice Test: Which Model Set Is Current and How to Read Your Result

If you have just marked a DTZ practice test, you are holding three separate numbers, not one score. What they mean depends on rules that are printed in the practice set itself, on pages most people never reach, and the answer key alone will not tell you which certificate those numbers would produce.

This guide covers the DTZ specifically: which model set is the current one, what you can mark honestly and what you cannot, how the three part results combine into an A2 or a B1 certificate, and what a weak part tells you to practise next.

If you are still choosing between exams, DTZ vs telc sets out the differences first. If you want the same guidance for the Goethe and telc exams, that is in the B1 practice test guide.

Start from the current model set

The Deutsch-Test für Zuwanderer, the German test for immigrants, is the language exam at the end of the BAMF integration course. BAMF is the Bundesamt für Migration und Flüchtlinge, the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. Since 2023 the job of running and administering the test has belonged to g.a.s.t., the institute that also runs the TestDaF.

g.a.s.t. publishes two free practice sets on its page Der DTZ auf einen Blick, the DTZ at a glance. Take Übungssatz 1 with its audio file first and keep Übungssatz 2 for a second run later. Übungssatz just means practice set. Both are dated June 2024.

Check that date, because a lot of what circulates is older. The Modellsatz on the Goethe-Institut’s DTZ page is the original one from 2009, and it is the version most blog posts and video walkthroughs are built on. The tasks in it are still the right task types, and the item counts have not changed. The exam procedure has:

• The 2009 set runs listening and reading as one combined block of 70 minutes, with the advice to answer in the booklet first and copy everything onto the answer sheet at the end.
• The current set runs the three written parts separately, 25 minutes for listening, 45 for reading, 30 for writing, with a stop notice printed at the end of each part and no turning ahead.

If you time yourself against the 2009 numbers, you will practise a procedure that no longer exists. Use the g.a.s.t. set for a full run, and treat the Goethe material as extra tasks.

That Goethe page is still worth opening for one thing the g.a.s.t. PDFs cannot give you. Its interactive DTZ tasks include the three speaking parts alongside reading, listening and writing, with an immediate check after each one. It is the only free official way to look at the speaking tasks on your own screen, in your own time, before you have to do them cold.

What is actually in the practice set

Past the tasks, the g.a.s.t. set is a reference document, and this is the half that makes honest self-marking possible. In both sets the pages are the same:

• page 37, the answer sheets, including the separate writing sheet;
• pages 42 to 43, the four assessment criteria for writing, with the descriptors for each level;
• pages 44 to 46, the five assessment criteria for speaking;
• pages 47 to 48, how the points and the part results are worked out;
• page 49, Zertifikat A2 oder B1?, the table of which combinations produce which certificate;
• page 51, the full listening transcripts;
• page 54, the answer key.

Print pages 42 to 49 before you sit the test. You will need them the same evening.

Sit it under the published procedure

The written exam is 100 minutes with no breaks, and each part may only be worked inside its own time. Listening runs about 25 minutes, reading 45, writing 30.

Two rules do more damage than the rest when people ignore them in practice.

Every listening text plays once. Not two of four parts, not the short ones twice. Once. Set the audio going and do not touch it again. If you allow yourself a replay at home you are training a habit that will cost you items on the day.

Only the answer sheet is marked. In listening and reading you may answer in the booklet or straight onto the sheet, but copying across happens inside your own exam time. g.a.s.t. describes that copying as part of the 75 minutes reading and writing take together, while the question booklet says each part may only be worked inside its own time, so do the copying before the reading clock stops rather than saving it for the end. In writing you write directly onto the writing sheet, and notes in the booklet are not marked at all.

If you would rather not keep the clock yourself, the timed mock exam runner runs the DTZ order and the published time on each part in your browser.

One part you cannot run alone. The speaking exam is normally a pair exam with two examiners, one conducting the conversation and one assessing it, and there is no preparation time. In a pair exam the whole thing takes about 20 minutes: roughly 4 minutes for part 1, 6 for part 2, 6 for part 3, and about 4 more while the two examiners compare their assessments. Find a partner and do it, or at minimum record yourself answering the same prompts under the same clock. Skipping it is not a neutral choice, for reasons the marking makes clear.

Mark it: three results, not one score

The DTZ does not add up to a single number. Listening and reading are pooled; writing and speaking each stand alone.

Part	Maximum	B1	A2	Below A2
Hören und Lesen (listening and reading)	45	33 to 45	20 to 32	0 to 19
Schreiben (writing)	20	15 to 20	7 to 14	0 to 6
Sprechen (speaking)	100	75 to 100	35 to 74.5	0 to 34.5

Listening and reading: exact, and pooled

Listening has 20 items, reading has 25, and every item is worth one point. Add the two together and look the total up in the table. There is no separate listening result and no separate reading result on your certificate, so a strong reading performance genuinely does carry a weak listening one, and the other way round.

That pooling is worth a moment. Twelve out of twenty in listening looks bad on its own. With 21 out of 25 in reading it is 33, which is B1.

Writing: one criterion you can count, three you can only estimate

g.a.s.t. says in its own FAQ that one trained assessor grades your text, against four criteria: Aufgabenbewältigung (did you do the task, called Inhalt or content in the summary table), kommunikative Gestaltung (does it work as a piece of communication), Korrektheit (grammar and spelling) and Wortschatz (vocabulary). Each criterion is placed at a level rather than given a raw mark, and the level then becomes a number: 5 for B1 done well, 4 for B1, 3 for A2 done well, 2 for A2, 1 for A1, 0 at the bottom. Four criteria, so 20 points at most.

The first criterion is the one you can mark yourself, because the practice set defines it by counting. The task gives you four content points, the Leitpunkte, and the grid on page 42 reads:

Points	What it means
5	All four content points handled precisely.
4	All four handled, but the reader has to do some work to follow. Or three handled properly.
3	Three handled, reader has to work. Or two handled properly.
2	Two handled, reader has to work. Or one handled properly.
1	Only one handled, and the reader has to work.
0	None handled, or the topic or the situation was misunderstood.

So count. Go through your letter with the task sheet beside it and mark off each of the four points. Do not count a point you mentioned in passing; count a point you actually dealt with.

Then read the footnote under that grid, because it is the single rule that produces the most surprising DTZ writing results. If the text has little or no connection to the writing prompt, every criterion has to be scored 0. Not the content criterion. All four. A well written letter about the wrong situation is worth nothing.

For the other three criteria, compare your text against the B1 and A2 descriptors printed on page 43 and be pessimistic. You are one person marking your own German, and you know what you meant to write.

Speaking: you cannot mark this, and it decides everything

Two licensed examiners assess you independently and the final score is the average of the two, which is why the published A2 band stops at 74.5 rather than 74. There is no honest way to reproduce that alone.

What you can do is look at where the points sit, because the practice set prints the grid. Half the 100 points come from how you handle the tasks, and half from pronunciation and intonation (10), fluency (10), accuracy (15) and vocabulary (15). The task half splits like this:

Task	Points
1A, talking about yourself	5
1B, answering the examiner’s follow-up questions	5
2A, talking about your picture	10
2B, answering follow-up questions about your own experience	10
3, Gemeinsam etwas planen, planning something together	20

Part 3 alone is worth as much as 1A, 1B and 2A put together. If you have one evening to spend on DTZ speaking, spend it there.

Read your three results into a certificate

Here is the rule, stated in the same words by g.a.s.t. and by BAMF on both its German and English pages:

You reach a level overall when you reach it in speaking and in at least one of the two other parts.

It works the same way for A2 and for B1. And the practice set adds the consequence that the web pages leave out: if your speaking result is below A2, you get no certificate at all, whatever the written parts say.

Read against your own three results, that produces five ways to a B1 certificate:

	Listening and reading	Writing	Speaking
1	B1	B1	B1
2	B1	A2	B1
3	B1	below A2	B1
4	A2	B1	B1
5	below A2	B1	B1

B1 in speaking appears in every row. Nothing else does. A candidate who reaches B1 in listening, reading and writing and A2 in speaking gets an A2 certificate, and that is one of the eleven combinations the same page lists for A2.

If you would rather type your four numbers in and see the bands and the margins worked out, the B1 exam result calculator applies these published rules for the DTZ, and also for Goethe and telc. It runs in your browser and issues no result.

What a self-marked practice test cannot tell you

Listening and reading are exact. You matched the key or you did not.

Everything else is an estimate, and the practice set says so about the real exam too: assessors are told to judge against the criteria and not by adding up numbers. Your writing estimate is one untrained person’s opinion of their own German. Your speaking estimate, without a partner and two examiners, is not a number at all.

There is also a limit that has nothing to do with marking. This is one paper on one day, in your kitchen, with your own clock. Two parts that came out at A2 and B1 might swap next month. Look for a part that is clearly behind the others, not for a two point difference.

Turn the weakest part into one thing to practise

Rank your three results and take the worst one. For the DTZ there is a tie-break the other exams do not have: if speaking is at or below the line, it goes first even when another part looks worse, because nothing else can carry it.

Weak part	What it usually means	Where to go
Speaking, part 3	You are taking turns making suggestions instead of building one plan together	Plan something together
Speaking, you froze or lost the thread	You have no phrase ready for the moment you do not understand the question	Repair phrases
Listening	You are still writing during the text, or waiting for a replay that will not come	First play, second play
Reading	You are reading whole texts instead of hunting the detail the item turns on	Read for evidence
Writing, content points missed	You are writing a good letter about the wrong things	B1 letter templates, or the German version, B1 Brief schreiben
Writing, ran out of time	You are composing from scratch instead of filling a shape you already know	The same two guides, used as a drill against the clock
Several parts at once, and the words were the problem	Vocabulary rather than technique	The DTZ word list, which gives an example sentence for every entry, or the B1 vocabulary list

Two of those rows need a warning attached.

The listening row is the one people underestimate. Single plays make DTZ listening less forgiving than its A2 to B1 label suggests, and the fix is a habit rather than knowledge: answer while you listen, accept a missed item, move on.

The vocabulary row is the honest answer when three parts came out weak and you cannot say why. Strategy guides help you use the German you have. They cannot supply words you never learned.

If you would rather have the order worked out for you, the B1 exam practice planner takes the same decision and adds the number of weeks you actually have left.

If this was your real result, not a practice one

Four things are worth knowing, and none of them are widely repeated in English.

A repeat means the whole exam again. g.a.s.t. states that you can repeat the DTZ as often as you like, but written and oral both have to be repeated and no part result carries over from an earlier attempt. This is where the DTZ differs sharply from the Goethe-Zertifikat B1, where each module stands alone, and from telc, where a failed part can be repeated by itself. Whether a repeat is covered for you depends on your integration-course entitlement, and your exam centre can tell you.

You can see your own papers. Within three months of getting your result you can apply to inspect your listening and reading answer sheets, your writing sheet and the assessment of your speaking. Inspections run for 15 minutes, normally on the second Wednesday of the month, at selected centres in Chemnitz, Berlin, Wedel, Hildesheim, Dortmund, Bingen am Rhein, Augsburg and Nürnberg. You do not get to see the tasks or the answer key. The g.a.s.t. DTZ FAQ has the application route, and applications can take up to eight weeks.

Results take a while. g.a.s.t. normally sends results to BAMF about two and a half weeks after the exam, BAMF validates them, and the certificates then go to the exam centre where you sat it. Ask your centre, not BAMF.

Complaints and appeals have a deadline. If something went wrong on the day, or you doubt the result, you have three months from the announcement of your result. Start with the centre where you took the exam.

One more, if it applies to you: if you need adjusted exam conditions for a disability, g.a.s.t. asks you to contact your exam centre at least three months before the exam date, and at least six months in the case of blindness, with a medical certificate in German or English that is less than two years old. That is a longer lead time than most course timetables assume, so raise it early.

Your next step

Download Übungssatz 1 and its audio, print the candidate pages and pages 42 to 49, and block 100 minutes this week. Play each listening text once. Stop at each stop notice.

Mark listening and reading against the key the same evening, while you still remember which items you guessed, and add the two together. Count your four content points in the letter. Then find someone to do part 3 with, because that is the part your certificate hangs on, and it is the one you cannot practise alone.