DELF practice tests: what is official, and what a score at home is worth

Sample papers exist, they are free, and they include the audio. The official DELF-DALF site maintained by the French Embassy in Canada distributes them for the whole range: DELF Prim A1.1, A1 and A2; DELF Scolaire and Junior A1 to B2; DELF Tout Public A1 to B2 and DALF C1 and C2; and DELF Pro A1 to B2. For DELF Tout Public, each level offers a set of collective papers, an individual paper, and a file of sound documents.

The label matters more than it looks. These are exemples de sujets — sample papers — and the files carry names built on sujet-demo. They are demonstration material produced to show the format. They are not the papers sat by candidates in a past session, and no page describes them that way. A site that offers you real DELF past papers is describing something that is not distributed.

That is a smaller loss than it sounds. The examination is standardised: what a sample shows about the shape of the paper, the number of documents, the type of question and the time allowed is exactly what a real paper would show. What it cannot show is a specific text you might meet again.

The most useful fact about the official samples is what is missing from them. On the distribution page, for DELF Tout Public at every level, there is no corrigé, no marking grid and no answer key of any kind. The papers are there, the audio is there, the correction is not.

This is the single point at which the query and the product diverge. The most common completion after "french practice" is "with answers", and the official material answers it with silence — not because someone forgot, but because two of the four papers have no answers to publish. A production écrite has no key. A production orale has no key. There is a marking grid used by examiners, and it is not part of what is handed to candidates.

So the honest reading of a downloaded sample is this: you can check your own reading and listening papers against nothing, and you cannot check your writing and speaking against anything at all. Which leads directly to the arithmetic in the next section.

The règlement des épreuves annexed to the Bulletin officiel sets the same architecture at A1, A2, B1 and B2: four papers — compréhension de l'oral, compréhension des écrits, production écrite, production orale — each marked out of 25, for a total out of 100.

Two of those four are production. Fifty marks out of a hundred are awarded for things you produce yourself: a text you write, and a conversation you hold with an examiner. Nothing you do alone at a table can put a number on either of them, and no free download will.

This is why a home score of 68/100 usually means a home score on 50 marks, doubled by optimism. It is not a small distortion. It is the difference between the part of the examination that is testable alone and the part that is not, and the second part is exactly half.

Two figures decide the result. The pass mark is 50 out of 100. And the minimum mark required in each paper is 5 out of 25 — at A1, A2, B1, B2 and C1. Fall below 5 on any single paper and the diploma is not awarded, whatever the other three papers did. At DALF C2, where there are two papers marked out of 50, the same rule sets the floor at 10 out of 50.

Read together, those two numbers describe a specific kind of failure. A candidate who is strong in reading and listening and has never had a spoken conversation in French can assemble 50 marks on paper and still not hold the diploma, because the oral came in under 5. That is the most common way a well-prepared reader loses, and it is invisible to any practice routine that only uses the papers a person can mark alone.

It also settles a question people ask in the wrong order. The useful question before a session is not "what is my total?" but "which of my four papers is nearest the floor?" — and that one can be answered honestly without a score.

A downloaded paper is worth what the conditions around it are worth. Three rules come straight out of the règlement and cost nothing to apply.

On the distribution page, A1 offers a single set of collective papers. A2, B1 and B2 each offer two, labelled exemple 1 and exemple 2. Downloading both and finding that the number of exercises and the shape of the questions are not the same is not an error in the files.

There is a documented reason for it — the examination's formats have not been static — and there is a limit to what this guide will say about it. The operator's own explanation of which format is currently distributed in official sessions sits on pages that refused automated access on 7 September 2026, so this article does not state which paper a candidate sitting in November 2026 will receive.

That is a question with a free and reliable answer: the examination centre. In Singapore that is the Alliance Française de Singapour, which states that the DELF and DALF are organised and delivered by the French Ministry of Education, and that the diplomas have lifetime validity. Ask them which format they are running, and prepare on that one. It is a two-line email that removes a variable no amount of downloading will remove.

The Alliance Française de Singapour publishes both the dates and the fees, and both are worth having in front of you before deciding how much practice a level deserves.

For the November 2026 session: DELF A1 on Monday 23 November, 09:00 to 10:30; DELF A2 on Tuesday 24 November, 09:00 to 11:00; DELF B1 on Wednesday 25 November, 09:00 to 11:05; DELF B2 on Thursday 26 November, 08:00 to 10:45; DALF C1 and DALF C2 both on Friday 27 November, 08:00 to 12:15 and 08:00 to 11:45 respectively. Those windows cover the collective papers; the individual oral is scheduled separately.

Fees, non-member and member: A1 S$220 and S$160; A2 S$270 and S$190; B1 S$330 and S$240; B2 S$380 and S$270; C1 and C2 S$450 and S$350. Retrieved 7 September 2026, and reissued each year — confirm at the centre before registering.

Set against those figures, the calculation that matters is not how many free papers you can find. It is whether the paper nobody can mark for you will hold up on the day.

None of this makes the samples useless. They are the only material that shows the real object, and three uses of them survive every caveat above.

Choosing a level. Sit the collective papers of two adjacent levels under time. If B1 reading is comfortable and B2 reading runs out of clock, that is a decision made on evidence rather than on a self-assessment quiz.

Finding the floor. Do the exercise honestly on the two production papers even though you cannot mark them: write the text, speak the presentation out loud to a recorder. The point is not a score. It is discovering that a B2 production orale asks for a defended point of view for twenty minutes, and noticing on a Tuesday in September rather than in the examination room.

Building the reflex of the single listening. That one is free, it is trainable alone, and at B2 it is worth several marks.

What free practice never does is close the loop on what you produced. A key marks a choice. It cannot read a sentence you invented and say why the third clause does not hold.

Our lessons are individual and by video, with teachers based in France. Examination preparation is 50 €/h, general French 45 €/h, invoiced in euros with no platform commission; unused hours are refunded in money rather than in credit. We are not an examination centre: in Singapore the DELF and the DALF are sat at the Alliance Française de Singapour, and registration is made there.

The site carries a free exercise bank, one tab per level from A1 to C2, 149 questions and 6 written-production tasks in total, with 24 to 25 questions in a level's session. The answers open only once the whole set has been completed, for the reason this guide has been making throughout: a correction shown question by question turns the score into assisted guessing. That bank is a fixed snapshot. The students we teach work from the same bank with new items added daily, and the items they get wrong are taken apart in the lesson.

The twenty-minute first conversation is free and it is a video call, which is the only format in which the two papers this guide keeps returning to can be looked at at all. Bring the sample paper you downloaded, and we will start from the parts of it you had no way of marking.