A2 Italian practice tests: how to actually use them to pass

A practice test is only useful if it reproduces the three real papers with their true weights and gives you a total out of 100. You do not pass the A2 Italian language test by knowing "more Italian" in general: you pass it by reaching at least 80 points out of 100 on the total, with no minimum on any single paper (Ministerial Decree of 7 December 2021, art. 3 co. 3). Anyone training on scattered exercises never sees that number — and that number is exactly what the outcome depends on.

What a serious practice test has to reproduce

Feature of the real test	Why it matters in a mock
Three papers: listening, reading, written interaction	Practice without the writing part skips 35 points out of 100
Weights 30 / 35 / 35	They completely change where your time is worth investing
Audio played twice	Replaying it at will builds a habit you will not have in the exam room
No penalty for a wrong answer	You need to train yourself to always answer, even when guessing
A total out of 100	The 80% threshold is what decides, not the individual exercise
About 60 minutes of working time	Time is part of the test

If any of these is missing, the mock trains your language but does not train you for the test.

Why a PDF on its own is not enough

The PDF files circulating online as "A2 past papers" have a structural limit: they are paper. A paper exercise cannot reproduce three things that carry real weight in the actual test.

1. The listening. Without the audio — and without the constraint of two playbacks — the 30-point paper simply does not exist.
2. The marking of the written part. Written interaction is worth 35 points and is not marked against an answer key: it is assessed in completion bands. A PDF with solutions cannot tell you which band you would have landed in.
3. The total. Adding up three differently weighted scores by hand is tedious, and almost nobody does it. The result is training that never once shows you the threshold.

There is also a question of reliability: the Ministry of the Interior publishes neither an official past paper nor a simulator, so any PDF you find online is third-party material, reconstructed. That does not make it useless — but use it knowing what it is, without granting it the authority of a source.

How to read the score of a practice test

After every full practice test, look at three numbers, in this order:

• The total out of 100. It is the only figure that matches the real rule. Below 80 you are below the threshold, full stop — not "nearly there".
• The margin left. With written interaction in the top band (35 points) you can lose a total of 20 points across the two comprehension papers; if your writing lands in the partial band (28), the margin drops to 13 — that is four listening questions, or three reading ones. The detailed arithmetic is in our guide to the scoring.
• Where you lost the points. A wrong reading answer costs 3.5 points, a listening one 3. Getting three readings wrong costs more than getting three listenings wrong.

One very common way of misreading a result: celebrating a 78. In a practice test, a 78 is a fail.

How many practice tests to sit, and when

There is no magic number, but there is a logic. Full, timed practice tests are expensive in terms of attention: they are there to measure, not to train. Targeted exercises are the opposite.

A progression that works:

1. At the start: one full practice test, to get an honest baseline and find out where you lose points.
2. In the middle: targeted work on your weakest paper, plus at least one written interaction task a week — it is the paper with the best effort-to-points ratio, 35 points for a single task of about ten minutes.
3. At the end: a second full practice test, against the clock, in conditions as close as possible to the real day.

If you want a path already mapped out week by week, use the four-week preparation plan.

Our practice tests

On Italiano A2 you will find two complete test packs, each with the three papers of the test — listening, reading and written interaction — in their real weights, with instant marking of the closed questions and the total out of 100 right in front of you: go to the practice tests. They are free and you can repeat them.

For the part no PDF can mark there is the writing trainer with AI feedback: you write your answer and get a judgement on how well it covers the information requested — which is the criterion by which written interaction is really assessed. Alongside it you will find photo description and monologues: these are language-skill exercises, not parts of the A2 test, and they are there to make your use of the language more confident.

One clarification about the format: our papers reconstruct the structure described by the decree and by the Ministry's technical specifications. They are not official papers and do not come from the Ministry or from a Prefettura, because published official papers do not exist. They are there to get you used to the structure and the threshold, which are the predictable part of the test.

The information in this guide is for general information only and is not legal advice. Practice tests are independent preparation material: the structure, criteria and binding rules are only those published in the legislative sources and on the pages of the Prefettura of your province.