The TYS sets its pass mark after you have sat it

The Institute's answer to "how many points do I need" does not contain a number. Candidates who succeed receive the certificate at B2 or C1, and the point ranges for those levels 15 Ocak 2022 sınavından itibaren her sınav sonrasında Modern Test Teorisine göre yapılacak analizlere göre belirlenmektedir — from the exam of 15 January 2022 onwards, they are set after each sitting according to analyses carried out under Modern Test Theory.

That is a real design decision and not evasiveness. Item response theory lets a body equate papers of unequal difficulty, so the same reported level means the same thing whether your paper happened to be a hard one or an easy one. The price of it is that the threshold is a property of the sitting, not of the exam — which is why it cannot be printed in advance.

This comparison is ours, and the contrast is sharp. Almost every body documented on this site answers the pass-mark question with an integer and lets the difficulty of the paper take care of itself. TORFL says 66% of each subtest. Poland says 50% up to B1 and 60% above it. The JLPT publishes a fixed mark per level out of 180. Ukraine's officials' exam publishes six percentage bands. Those numbers are certain and, if a paper runs hard, quietly unfair. The TYS gives up the certainty to keep the fairness. Neither is a trick; they are opposite answers to the same measurement problem, and only one of them can be put on a poster.

Two practical consequences follow. You cannot calculate, in the exam room, whether you have already done enough — and no coaching site can honestly tell you the mark to aim for. And there is no third outcome below B2: unlike the ladders that hand out a lower certificate for a lower score, a TYS result under the B2 range produces no document.

The Institute publishes the whole structure as a table: question counts, points and minutes, section by section.

Reading — 40 questions, 25 points, 60 minutes. Listening — 30 questions, 25 points, 45 minutes. Writing — 2 questions, 25 points, 60 minutes (the first task 10 points in 20 minutes, the second 15 points in 40). Speaking — 8 questions, 25 points, 15 minutes (independent speaking, one task, 10 points in 5 minutes; interactive speaking, seven questions, 15 points in 10 minutes). 80 questions, 100 points, 180 minutes, delivered in three sittings with a 15-minute break after listening and a further break before speaking.

The arithmetic is ours; both columns are theirs. The four skills are weighted exactly equally — 25 points each, to the point — while the clock is not equal at all. Speaking is 15 of the 180 minutes and 25 of the 100 points. Divide, and a minute of speaking is worth exactly four minutes of reading, four minutes of writing and three minutes of listening.

Per question the gap is wider still, because a "question" is not a unit of anything. A reading question is worth 0.625 points. The second writing task is worth 15. One 40-minute writing task therefore carries the same weight as twenty-four reading questions, and the five-minute spoken monologue carries the same as sixteen of them.

This comparison is ours. Ukraine's citizenship exam does the same thing — four parts at 25% each over 15, 60, 40 and 35 minutes — and the TYS pushes it further: one twelfth of the clock for one quarter of the marks. Both are worth knowing for the same reason. A candidate who rations preparation by how long a section lasts is rationing it exactly backwards, and the section that looks smallest is the one where the marks are densest.

Most examining bodies documented on this site answer the fee question either with one national number or by pointing at the centre. Yunus Emre Enstitüsü does neither. It publishes a single table of fifty-seven countries with a price against each, in four currencies, and states that it reserves the right to change them.

The range is wide. 50 USD in Gambia, Iraq, Cambodia, Nigeria and Oman. 80 USD in Afghanistan, Canada, Iran, Uzbekistan, Pakistan, Rwanda, Somalia. 100 USD across much of Latin America, the Caucasus and North Africa. 140 USD in Qatar, Lebanon, Malaysia, South Korea and Jordan. 160 USD in the United States and Japan. In euros it runs from 80 EUR — Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Kosovo, North Macedonia, Moldova, Serbia, Senegal, Ukraine — to 140 EUR in Germany, Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands and Italy, with Spain at 120 and Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania at 100. The United Kingdom is 100 GBP, Russia 8,000 RUB, and Turkey and Northern Cyprus 800 TL. Syria is listed at 300 TL, well under Turkey's own figure in the same currency.

This observation is ours. Between the cheapest and the most expensive dollar-denominated entries there is a factor of more than three on the same exam, and the pattern is not random: the highest prices sit in the highest-income markets and the lowest in the lowest. Other bodies documented here reach the same end by other means — Poland writes a legal ceiling and lets centres price beneath it, Norway devolves the price to the municipality, Ukraine ties it to a statutory subsistence minimum. The TYS is the only one we have read that simply publishes the tier for every country in one list, which makes it both the most transparent of them and the most explicit about charging different people different amounts for the same paper.

The discounts are published as a schedule too, and one line in it is worth reading twice. Fifty per cent goes to candidates enrolled on Yunus Emre Enstitüsü's own Turkish courses, to Institute staff, to students in Turcology departments at partner universities abroad, to students at Türkiye Maarif Vakfı schools, to candidates at the St Petersburg centre and members of the Qatar Armed Forces Language Institute, and to locally engaged staff at the overseas missions of a named list of Turkish state bodies. Twenty-five per cent goes to students in non-Turcology departments at those same partner universities.

So the largest discount available on this exam goes to people who learned Turkish from the body that sets it. We are not going to characterise that; it is a real halving of a real price, published openly, and a candidate choosing where to study Turkish should know it exists before they choose.

Two smaller sums, both easy to be caught by. A lost certificate can be replaced once only, on written application to the centre where you sat, for 20% of the exam fee plus shipping. And a candidate who applies and does not turn up has the application cancelled and the fee is not refunded — there is no published illness or force-majeure route on the pages we read, which is a narrower position than Ukraine's enumerated list of excuses or Russia's conflict commission.

Türkçe Yeterlik Belgesi 2 (iki) yıl boyunca geçerlidir. The certificate is valid for two years. That puts the TYS with Korea's TOPIK at the short end of a range that runs through SIELE's five years to the certificates that never expire at all — the DELE, the Polish state certificate, TestDaF, the Dutch NT2 and Ukraine's state certificate.

This comparison is ours. A two-year term is not a claim that your Turkish decays in two years. It is a claim about how long the institution is prepared to vouch for a measurement, and bodies split on it in a way that tracks what the certificate is for: documents that gate a permanent status — citizenship, a professional appointment — tend not to expire, and documents that gate an admission decision that is taken afresh every year tend to. The TYS gates university entry, and it expires.

Budget for the wait as well as the exam. Results are published on average four to five weeks after the sitting, and the certificates are handed to the courier about thirty days after the results, with delivery time on top depending on the country. From exam day to a document in your hand is therefore something like nine weeks before shipping — which matters, because the TYS runs three times a year, and the Institute reserves the right to change the number and the dates.

One more thing that costs nothing to know. The Institute states that the exam is for people learning Turkish yabancı dil ya da anadil olarak — as a foreign language or as a mother tongue. It is explicitly open to heritage and native speakers who need the document, not only to learners, and its own list of who sits it includes translators and people intending to teach Turkish abroad as well as university applicants.

The Institute publishes level descriptors for each of the four skills, and they are worth reading before you decide which level you are aiming at, because they are more concrete than the CEFR's own wording. At B2 in speaking you can talk to native speakers büyük uğraş vermeden — without great effort — and take your turn in a conversation when it comes to you. At C1 you can express yourself at will in social, academic and professional life, and set out views on complex subjects in an organised and detailed way.

And then the page carries a full set of C2 descriptors as well, for reading, listening, writing and speaking — at C2 in writing you can summarise information gathered from different written and spoken sources, argue with a correct structure, and draw on abstract concepts and figurative language.

This is ours, and we are stating it rather than resolving it. The FAQ says the certificate is awarded at B2 and C1. The descriptors page defines B2, C1 and C2. The pages we read on 9 September 2026 do not say how a C2 descriptor relates to a certificate that stops at C1 — whether it is a level the exam once reported, one it is built to support, or simply the complete scale published for reference. A reader should not assume a C2 certificate is available because a C2 descriptor is published, and we are not going to guess which it is. Ask the Institute before planning around it.

A last detail that says something about how seriously the instrument is taken. The Institute describes its listening texts as recorded in advanced studios by professional voice artists, and its items as written by a specialist team and then checked by independent assessment specialists and linguists before the booklet is made up. Since the sitting of 15 January 2022 the certificate carries the ALTE Q-mark, which the Institute describes as making it Turkish's first and only internationally valid language proficiency document — that last part is the Institute's characterisation of its own exam, and we record it as theirs rather than adopting it.

The practical rules are published and they are strict. Be at the centre at least half an hour before the start. Bring identity card or passport and your exam entry document. Watches, mobile phones, pagers, calculators and bags are absolutely forbidden in the hall — and, since you cannot bring a watch, the Institute puts a wall clock in every exam room so that candidates can manage their own time.

Water is allowed if it is in a transparent plastic bottle. You may make notes in the blank areas of the question booklet — there is no separate rough paper and no rule against annotating.

This is ours, and it is a small thing worth noticing. A body that bans watches and then installs clocks has thought about what the ban costs the candidate. It is the same instinct as publishing the point value of every section: the exam is difficult on purpose and confusing by accident, and this one has gone through its own rules looking for the accidents.