Here are some useful tips and information on the practice exams.

Exam Development

These exams were prepared by a team of professional, native French speaking, French teachers that formerly taught French to public service and military members in preparation for testing.  Several also taught post-secondary French.  The questions, tricks, rules, and vocabulary they have developed is based on the public service materials taught in various schools and what can be expected on the government exams.  While no information is copied from the exams (this would be illegal), they are intended to replicate the same grammar rules, tricks, and difficulty progression found on the exams.  One area that cannot be tested is very unique questions that are specific to the public service exams are are very tricky and largely unknown or little used grammar constructs.  There are usually 2-5 questions like these on the exams.  The best way to overcome these is through regular reading and pattern recognition if you did not grow up in a bilingual setting.

Intent

The intent of these practice exams is to give you a realistic self assessment of your ability to tackle the French grammar exam.

Assessment Score

Our testing shows that if you can achieve a 90% on these exams, you will be well positioned to achieve a high B to high C score.  A level E would mean you only have 5 errors on the entire exam which puts you at a native level of speaking.  Most people with E scores have an exceptional understanding (e.g., graduate degree level) of grammar or came from bilingual backgrounds.  We encourage you to repeat the exams until you can complete them with a 90% score and understand, vice memorize, each of the grammar principles.  If you can leave with that understanding, your score will likely be even higher.  A score of 60% or higher will most likely position you at a B level and for this reason, we have set the passing grade at 60%.

If you find certain questions harder than others, this is normal.  To reinforce the learning concept, go back to the practice exercises and review them.

You have unlimited attempts at all exercises and exams on this site for the duration of your subscription.

General Instructions

Each practice exam is intended to replicate the time allocation and nature of the exam questions on the public service grammar exams.  Unlike the exercises, these are timed, have a mixed assortment of questions, and get progressively harder.

Practice Exam 7

This exam is a more advanced exam than the others.  It will simulate the exam and not provide translated answer aids for most questions as other quiz and practice questions on this site will give.  This is to provide you an opportunity to test your reading comprehension and target yourself onto areas that need improvement for vocabulary and sentence structure without relying on a translation.  Repeat this exam until you can achieve 90% and understand each of the grammar structures and the context and content of the questions.  If your score is below 70%, we encourage you to do more daily reading (out loud for 30 minutes a day) and repeat the practice exercises.

Tips

We recommend the following tips:

1.  Read daily for 30 minutes using news articles or government documents.  This will help you with pattern recognition, grammar concepts, and vocabulary.
2. As you complete the questions in the practice exams, jot down on a piece of paper the grammar rules that you did not clearly understand.
3. Repeat the practice exercises for areas you did not understand.
4. Seek out other sources of reliable information for alternate explanations.

Supplementary and Complementary Materials

These exam questions can be used to supplement or replace other practice sources you may have.  If you have access to older practice exams from the public service, these can be helpful in addition to these questions.  There are over 450 questions in just this practice question bank.