yo. thanks for the tips, but I think a lot of them are wrong, unfortunately.
- examiners don't look in the notes section. and, even if they do, there certainly don't give any marks for anything they read there. in fact, in the listening section for example, if part of your answers goes into the notes box on the side, they disregard it
- if the question's worth one mark and you write more than one answer, they only look at the first thing you wrote and completely ignore the other bit. so if your first answer was wrong and the second part was right, it is very unlikely that you will get any marks.
- you are not allowed to tab dictionaries, and I'm pretty sure you're not even allowed to fold down the corners
- writing in a full sentence when it doesn't ask you to could be a waste of time, but it's better than writing a dot point that doesn't give enough information
- the word limit for the essays is 250 - 300 words, not 200 - 300
ok, I concede. the world limit is 200 - 300, you were right. désolée! my teacher always told me 250 -300 though, hmm...- I would be spending at least 5 - 8 minutes of the reading time looking over the listening questions, because you probably won't have any other time to do this (certainly not between texts) whilst you will have ample time to look at the reading/essay. I personally suggest going immediately to the essays and picking your topic (I'd spend only 1 -2 mins on this), reading over the reading comprehensions briefly to get an idea of what they're about (about 5 or so minutes) and then the making sure you've thoroughly read the listening (for the rest of the time)
bonne chance tout le monde!
p.s. I'm not an expert either, not even a little bit, but I DID just do a German exam, so I know what I'm talking about