If it's like my experience taking four years of French in high school, no one, not the teachers, not the parents, and not the students, were under the delusion that we'd be sitting down in a French cafe having in-depth conversations with the locals, or even that we'd find it useful in general. You could pass the class and check if off on your college application if you could write down that "bathroom" = "la salle des bain" on a test with being nowhere actually fluent.