I’m taking the HSK4 in a few weeks, and instead of studying, I’m procrastinating a little bit by opening this topic… but I thought it would be nice to have a “support group” here for people who will be taking the HSK soon.
If you’re studying for an upcoming exam, please share your thoughts, anxieties or study tips! We’re all in it together. 
加油！!
I’m officially “ close” to that level with around 1200 words not strictly following hsk though. I’m trying to get the 300 or so words I don’t know using hsk4 by end years end to take advantage of apps that use that system.
I finally did the exam last month! It was ok, though I did the internet-based version, and ran into some technical problems during the exam… The test needs to be done on a Windows computer, and since I don’t have one, I installed a virtual machine to run Windows so that I could run the software. It worked fine on the days before as I was doing mock tests, but on the day itself the part of rearranging the words for making a sentence didn’t work with my trackpad. The people supervising were super nice and gave me five extra minutes to frantically look for a mouse in the house that I could use. In the end, it wasn’t quite enough to finish, but I did what I could and even without that section, I think I should have enough points to pass.
If you’ve done the test recently, how did you do?
About one year later, I’m now at the point where I’ve had enough of a break and am starting to think of preparing for HSK 5! 
I think maybe next March, if I can keep up this study streak… There’s a neat Coursera course that will definitely help with that.
Is anyone planning to take an HSK exam soon?
I’m not taking the test, but I did go through the Standard Course textbooks for HSK 5 and found them to be pretty good in terms of content. But even though I made it through the books, I realized my reading speed was way below what it needed to be if I were to take the test. So after that I switched to a lot of extensive reading (Du Chinese, manga/manhua, Weixin articles), which I also found a lot more interesting and enjoyable than the straightforward textbook stuff anyway. 加油！