Rubrics (grille d'évaluation) for the DELF B2

France Education International (FEI), the administer of the DELF/DALF test, does a particularly good job of not gatekeeping what you're being graded on. They publish and make accessible the grilles d'évaluations (grading rubrics) for each level, but I'm surprised how few people know about them.

Take for example the B2 rubric for the production écrite. It's split into 5 categories for examiners:

• Réalisation de la tâche
• Cohérence et cohésion
• Adéquation sociolinguistique
• Lexique
• Morphosyntaxe

For the section around coherence and cohesion, FEI literally lists the connectors that examiners could look for as examples of well constructed logical arguments. Néanmoins, cependant, bien que, toutefois, premièrement, en conclusion, etc. So as previous examiners have told me, they will read this guide, then read your paper. If they see these connectors, and assuming your arguments are actually well-formed, they'll mentally "check a box" for this section.

When you're looking over your practice tests, or these days asking ChatGPT to grade, first feed the AI this rubric!