This exam tips covers Exam Tips & Common Errors within Adjective agreement and position for GCSE French. Revise Adjective agreement and position in Core Grammar Toolkit for GCSE French with 15 exam-style questions and 15 flashcards. This topic shows up very often in GCSE exams, so students should be able to explain it clearly, not just recognise the term. It is section 7 of 7 in this topic. Treat this as a marking guide for what examiners are looking for, not just a fact list.
💡 Exam Tips & Common Errors
- In AQA writing, every adjective you use is an AO2 opportunity — agreeing it correctly shows grammatical control. Disagreeing it loses an accuracy mark.
- When describing a person, always identify their gender first, then check your adjective endings — it is easy to write elle est grand by forgetting to apply the feminine form.
- Irregular forms like belle, nouvelle, vieille appear very frequently in AQA topics (home, environment, relationships) — learn them as vocabulary pairs, not as exceptions to look up.
- For Higher: using adjective position deliberately (pre-noun vs post-noun for meaning shift) is a sophisticated feature that can contribute to AO3 communication marks.
- If an adjective ends in -if in the masculine, the feminine always ends in -ive: sportif/sportive, actif/active, créatif/créative.
❌ Common error: Elle est très grand et sportif.
✓ Correct: Elle est très grande et sportive.
Why it costs marks: The subject is feminine (elle), so both adjectives must take the feminine form. Using the masculine base form is an AO2 grammar error — it shows the rule for adjective agreement has not been applied, which examiners note explicitly in the mark scheme.
❌ Common error: J'ai une maison belle et nouvelle.
✓ Correct: J'ai une belle et nouvelle maison.
Why it costs marks: beau/belle and nouveau/nouvelle are BAGS adjectives — they must go BEFORE the noun. Placing them after is a positional error that costs an AO2 mark and sounds unnatural to a native speaker.
Practice questions for Adjective agreement and position
Which ending do you add to most adjectives to make them feminine?
Where do most French adjectives go relative to the noun?