It's been known (at least in Confucius institue in my country) if you take HSK test outside of China, it's easier and the grading is pretty lenient.
u/Marizza_Tan, comment on "hsk 6", Reddit r/ChineseLanguage, 14 Nov 2022.
I'm skeptical about this claim. I'm fairly sure the exam itself is identical (there are Chinese teachers in Korea that upload YouTube videos on the same day giving the answers, so you can go home after taking the exam and see what you got right/wrong). The listening and reading sections are multiple choice, and I would expect them to be marked by computer.
At the same time, adjustments are made to standardize the difficulty (so you can score an odd-number percentage on a 50-question exam, which would not be mathematically possible otherwise; see e.g. also this and this). They collect your country data on the exam, and these statistics show up on the chinesetest.cn website if you look up your scores.
So I'm not sure...
Question: Is the HSK exam easier outside of China?
Update: Redditor u/isaac888666 made a similar claim (4 Dec 2022):
I have some anecdotal evidence of this. For example, after failing the test in China several times, friends and classmates of mine took the home version of the test while being on China but joined the test from countries in where HSK is not popular and there aren't many people taking the test. All of them inmediately got passing scores on their first attempt.
