What confuses me about JLPT levels (at least as they're stated on jisho.org) is that even though a word is labeled as N3, the second kanji is N1 and the word is not usually written in hiragana, so you need to recognize the kanji in order to read the word. As far as I know, there's no separate kanji section in the JLPT tests, so then what is the kanji level referring to? Active use in handwriting?