The JLPT is a paper exam, sat at a designated test site — often a university — on the first Sunday of July or December.
It is a longer, more formal day than JFT-Basic, and the format differs in ways worth knowing in advance.
Before the day
Bring your test voucher and your identification. The voucher carries your examinee number and your room. Without it the day becomes difficult.
Check your site and your route when the voucher arrives. JLPT sites are often large campuses with many buildings, and finding the right room can take twenty minutes after you arrive on site. Add that to your travel time.
Bring the right pencils. The answer sheet is machine-read: HB or No.2 pencils and an eraser. Not pen. Bring more than one of each; a snapped pencil should not be an event.
Bring a watch that is not a smartwatch, if you want to track time. Rooms do not reliably have a visible clock, and phones will be put away.
The shape of the day
Arrive for the reporting time on your voucher, which is earlier than the start. Expect seat allocation by examinee number, identification checks, and instructions read out in full before anything begins.
The exam runs in timed sections with breaks between them, and this is the key structural difference from JFT-Basic:
JLPT sections are separately timed. You cannot carry unused time forward, and you cannot go back to an earlier section.
On JFT-Basic you manage one sixty-minute clock across everything. On the JLPT the clock is managed for you, section by section. That removes one problem and creates another: if you are slow in reading, there is no borrowing from elsewhere.
The listening section is played once, for the whole room, from the front. There is no individual control, no headphones at most sites, and no replay.
What costs people points
Not finishing the reading section. The most common avoidable loss, especially at N2 and N1. Reading is timed tightly by design, and candidates who have only practised untimed arrive unprepared for the constraint rather than the Japanese.
Leaving answers blank. There is no negative marking. An unanswered question scores the same as a wrong one, so a guess is free. Never leave a bubble empty — and fill in the remaining ones when time is called if you have to.
Mis-shading the answer sheet. It is machine-read. Marks must be clear, inside the bubble, and erased properly when changed. Answers shifted by one row — a real and devastating error — happen when candidates skip a question on the sheet as well as in the booklet.
Losing the listening section to one question. The audio does not wait. If you miss one, mark something and attend to the next. Candidates who dwell on a missed item lose the following one too.
The breaks
Use them. Stand up, drink water, do not review notes about the section you have just finished — it cannot be changed and it will unsettle you for the section that can.
Afterwards
There is no score on the day. This is the other big difference from JFT-Basic, which gives you a provisional result on screen before you leave.
Online results are typically published around late August for the July sitting and late January for the December sitting, with certificates following by post. See JLPT results and certificates.
That gap is long, and there is nothing useful to do inside it. If you are on a deadline for a visa application, factor it in — and note that JFT-Basic turns results around in about five business days.