AQA French Writing Easier than I thought?

So I'm in year 11 now and I'm doing AQA GCSE French. Now my French teacher is really lovely but does have a strange way of teaching: all she does is set us exercises from the textbook for homework and we spend our entire lessons marking those exercises. She never writes any methods or stuff down, we only have a book for exercises. She does however make us write essays every few weeks. So for the essays, she told us that writing 90/150 words were never going to get you the top grades and you had to write 3 sides minimum for each question and involve every type of language structure you can. She also only gives you a 9 if you have 95% (Exam board puts 9s roughly around 80%) so my predicted grades are rubbish. The other week the another french teacher was covering our lesson and she did some stuff on exam technique. She showed us an exam board exemplar and it was only 2 words above the limit and the language was rather simple. My class were like whattttt? So I looked more into the marking scheme and you don't even have to write in every tense for the 150 marker and or the 90 marker you only have to give an opinion not justify it. The thing is this this seems so easy? Does anyone else find them really easy or have I got the wrong end of the stick???