AP French Conversation Practice: les questions sur votre projet.
AP French conversation practice now means preparing for Question 2, the Project Q&A. A recorded interlocutor asks four questions about the research project you have worked on all year, and you get 40 seconds to answer each one. It is worth 15% of your exam score and 9 rubric points. AP Spanish was rebuilt in exactly the same way, so if you are sitting both, the preparation transfers. Our AP Spanish speaking hub covers that side.
What the AP French conversation task is now
The speaking conversation is Question 2 of the free-response section, and College Board calls it the Project Q&A. It runs immediately after Question 1, the Project Presentation, as one continuous recorded event: you deliver your presentation, and then an interlocutor starts asking about it.
After a short introduction, the interlocutor asks four questions. You get 40 seconds for each answer. The questions are about the course project you have been researching since the topic was published, which College Board does in January of the exam year. You are not told the four questions in advance, and because the interlocutor is a recording, there is nobody to ask for a repeat.
Question 2 carries 15% of the total exam score. The Project Presentation before it carries 20% and the Argumentative Essay carries 15%, so the three free-response questions are half the exam between them. The other half is 55 multiple-choice questions split between listening and reading. The whole thing is taken digitally in Bluebook. For the rest of it, see our guide to the AP French Language and Culture exam.
One date matters before exam day. Your Personalized Project Reference, the word-limited outline you take into the presentation, is completed in the AP Digital Portfolio and has to be submitted by 30 April. It is an outline of key words, not a script, and you are not permitted to read from it. The format details here are all drawn from College Board’s AP French exam page and the published course and exam description.
What replaced the simulated conversation
If you have been revising from almost anything else online, you have probably met the AP French simulated conversation: five turns, 20 seconds each, a social scenario about an invitation or a phone call. That task was retired. It was examined for the last time in May 2026, and from the 2026-27 school year the exam has three free-response questions instead of four.
The email reply is gone. The standalone cultural comparison presentation is gone as well, which is the change students miss most, because it did not disappear so much as move: cultural comparison is now a scoring row inside the Q&A itself.
Three things carried over. There is still a recorded interlocutor, the turns are still timed, and you still get one attempt. Four things changed: five turns became four questions, 20 seconds became 40, a stranger’s social scenario became your own research, and the cultural comparison stopped being a separate task.
How the Project Q&A is scored
Question 2 is marked out of 9 on an analytic rubric with four reporting categories. Knowing how they divide is worth more than it sounds, because the categories are not equally easy to earn.
Task Execution, 2 points
This is the row for actually answering. Both points go to a response that maintains the exchange and addresses the prompts, with minor inconsistencies tolerated. College Board’s scoring notes describe a typical two-point performance as one that gives the requested information for at least three of the prompts, so a single weak turn is not necessarily fatal. Treat that as guidance rather than a threshold, and answer all four.
Cultural Understanding, 2 points
This is the row to plan for. One point goes to describing the target culture’s products, practices or perspectives. The second point needs something more specific: in at least one of your four answers you have to either draw a cultural comparison, or explain the relationship between a cultural perspective and a cultural product or practice. Describing is not comparing. If you never make that move, 2 of the 9 points are gone before the language is judged at all.
Language Control, 3 points
The largest single row. Full marks call for a wide range of vocabulary including culturally relevant expressions, control of a variety of grammatical structures, and no errors that get in the way of being understood. Errors are not disqualifying; errors that impede comprehensibility are.
Fluency, 2 points
Rate of speech, intonation and clear pronunciation, judged on whether the listener has to work. Pronunciation is assessed here rather than in its own row.
How to practise AP French conversation
The useful form of AP French speaking practice for this task is short, timed and unrehearsed. A routine that matches the exam looks like this.
- Record yourself answering against a 40-second timer, so you learn what a complete answer of that length feels like.
- Have someone ask you follow-up questions you have not planned for, straight after you deliver your presentation. AP Classroom publishes an Anticipatory Project Q&A Organizer for exactly this, and it is worth using with a classmate.
- Force one cultural comparison into every practice run until it is automatic. That is the Cultural Understanding point, and it is the one most easily lost.
- Practise the handover. Questions 1 and 2 run back to back, so rehearsing the presentation in isolation leaves you cold for the part that is actually unscripted.
The buying-time phrases below are worth memorising, because the top fluency mark explicitly allows natural pauses and filler words. A brief hesitation while you think is not what costs points.
French phrases that fit the task
The phrase lists written for the old simulated conversation do not transfer cleanly. Thanking someone for an invitation or signing off with à bientôt made sense in a social exchange and makes none in an interview about your research. These four functions are the ones the new task actually asks for.
Build this list once in French and once in Spanish if you are taking both.
How it compares with AP Spanish
Both exams were rebuilt for 2026-27 and they were rebuilt identically: the same three free-response questions, the same Project Presentation and Project Q&A, four questions, 40 seconds a turn, and the same four-row rubric out of 9. If you already studied for AP Spanish, the conversation task transfers directly, and if you are taking both AP exams, the practice transfers.
What that means in practice is that our AP Spanish language conversation practice page is describing the same shape of task in the other language, so the strategy work is not duplicated effort. When you want to turn a projected raw score into a 1 to 5, the AP French calculator does the conversion.
Frequently asked questions
Quick answers, checked against College Board.
Is AP French harder than AP Spanish?
On the 2025 results, yes. 73.5% of AP French students scored 3 or higher against 84.9% in AP Spanish, and the mean score was 3.20 against 3.58. Narrowing both to the Standard Group, which excludes students who already speak the language outside school, AP French still trails: 8.8% earned a 5 against 15.3%, and 70.1% reached a 3 against 80.4%. AP French is also a far smaller exam, at 19,905 candidates against 185,429.
Do I have to speak for the full 40 seconds?
Not strictly, but plan to. College Board’s scoring notes say a student who stops before the time runs out can still earn the maximum in that category if the answer already satisfies the criteria. The course materials separately tell teachers to encourage students to use the full 40 seconds, and that is the safer habit: a short answer is much more likely to leave a prompt half-addressed than a full one is to be marked down for length.
When is the 2027 AP French exam?
Session 1 is Thursday 6 May 2027. That sitting is the first time the redesigned course is examined, so it is also the first exam on which the Project Presentation and Project Q&A replace the old simulated conversation and cultural comparison.
Is AP French conversation practice still useful now the task has changed?
More useful than before. The four questions are not published in advance and they follow whatever you said in your presentation, so there is nothing to memorise and a scripted answer will break the moment the question turns. Speaking unrehearsed about your own research is the only preparation that matches the task. What has stopped being useful is drilling social scripts for invitations and phone calls, which is what the retired task rewarded.