Skip to main content

Examinations, the French Way



This month in France took place a rite of passage: the high school baccalauréat. Often translated as ‘high school diploma’, the baccalauréat is the mandatory, nationalized high school exit exam students must take in order to continue with their studies. While nowadays having one’s bac is becoming more and more common (much like having a high school diploma in the United States), for some students it is the first of many exams they will take in their adult lives, in both educational and work contexts.

Because not only is right now the end of the baccalauréat, it is also the middle of the ‘concours’ season for many other areas of study. Concours, a word impossible to translate in English, is more or less a competitive exam. Competitive because the results of a concours do not depend on how good you score, but how much better you score than everyone else taking the exam.

I’ve had an inside look into two concours going on at the moment, the agrégation in English (an exam to have a tenured position as an English teacher or professor) and the concours for entrance into some of France’s Grandes Écoles de Commerce (business schools, mostly private).

I think it’s worth mentioning these concours because they are such a defining element of the French system, both in the public and private sectors. Incidentally, France is different from the US in this way: the best, most prestigious schools are generally public. This is why you have to pass a competitive exam (concours) to get into them—they only have a certain amount of places available every year, and they only take the top students who have passed the national exams. Private schools can be prestigious, but the most prestigious ones also require a concours to enter.   

Both the concours for the agrégation (already mentioned in a previous post) and the concours for business school begin with several written exams, in different subjects.  The agrégation is specialized  in a field, so most of the areas students are tested on related to their field. The exams for business schools are quite different, however. Students are tested in multiple areas, including language (English and either Spanish or German), mathematics, marketing and finance, and France’s specialty, general culture (essentially philosophy and literature). Even in preparation for business school, then, philosophy and literature are viewed as essential subjects that students should be tested on.

What happens if you don’t pass the concours? Either way you have basically lost a year of study. In the case of the agrégation, some people take the exam just to try it and see what it is like. Often the program and list of books changes each year, so you will probably have to learn an entire new set of literature for the following year. When it comes to entrance to business school, the concours quite simply controls where you are admitted, and where you are not.  Subjects are also weighted, so the exam for mathematics will probably count more than the section in Spanish, for example.

As I stated earlier, a key component of these exams, and most concours, is both a written and an oral exam. Usually, the written exam happens first and is followed by a first selection. Those who are good enough and who reached a certain level are summoned for the oral exam.

This is another specifically French touch: the oral exam. These are not just question and answer sessions.  Oral exams for the agrégation last for hours, the idea being that students have several hours to prepare a sort of lecture on a given topic, before presenting it to the jury.

Oral exams in the entrance to business school, at least in English, are also very specific. Students are given an article from the press and have 20 minutes to prepare an organized oral presentation that lasts 10 minutes. In those 10 minutes they must present the document in context, synthesize the article, and then present a commentary, often where they explore the pros and cons of a particular issue. This exam is then testing their comprehension skills in English, obviously their oral production skills, but also, and perhaps most importantly their reasoning and analytical skills. It helps to put this into perspective to realize that students have oral exams in other subjects than just languages, sometimes even in math!

I think then that the agrégation and concours for entrance into business school reveal a lot about the French system. In particular, the emphasis on oral expression illustrates the French obsession with rhetoric. Students are expected to talk about a given topic and analyze it. If they don’t know very much about the topic, they are still supposed to act like they know something about it.

The announcement of the eligible students is also a no frills approach. The names of students admitted to a concours are plainly listed all together, in ranking order from first to last. In other words, there is no effort to hide student names from one another and keep the exam results individual. Often these lists are printed and posted in the place where students took a concours so they can check for their names.

And so, as I said at the beginning, the baccalauréat is just one of many exams students will take over the course of their lives. It is, I think, their initiation into France’s very standardized system and in this sense a true rite of passage.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Simple comme bonjour

The title of this post Simple comme bonjour (literally 'easy as hello') is a French expression used to mean that something is easy, roughly the equivalent of 'easy as pie' in English.  There are certain things that you need to know in order to function in society in France, and especially, in order to be treated like a normal human being by others. One of these is the importance of greetings and closings, or more specifically, the use of hello and goodbye. This may sound silly, but don’t be fooled.   It is, in my opinion, one of the most important social cues in France. And without prior cultural knowledge, there's nothing simple about it.  Hello and goodbye (bonjour and au revoir) structure your interaction with just about anyone in France.  When I get onto an elevator with a stranger, I say hello and goodbye. When I enter a store, the clerk and I both say ‘hello’ and make eye contact. And obviously, when I meet up with friends or family, I will also ...
6 comments
Read more

Taking on l'éducation nationale

The past two weeks in France could seem strange to a tourist visiting the country: within days streets that were empty for weeks while most of the country was on vacation all of a sudden became busy again. It’s that time of year again: back to school!  La rentrée (literally the return, or rather, start of the school year) is no small matter in France. Rather than a progressive return to school over the course of a month or so (as I would describe the process in the U.S.), back to school in France happens all on the same day (September 4 this year).  This, like many other things in France, is due to high centralization and the massive establishment that is known as l’éducation nationale. In keeping with the cultural interest of this blog, I’d like to begin to dig into this beast that is l’éducation nationale. As a foreigner, I’ve been lucky to get an inside look into the school system here, both at the high school and university levels. I’m convinced, from what I’ve...
5 comments
Read more

A Regional Tour of France

In the US regional differences are stretched out for miles and miles. Even though are regions and landscapes can be incredibly diverse, the change from one to another is fairly gradual and you often have to drive a long way before anything changes. Not the case in France. Just taking the area Lyon, you have to the east flatlands with small lakes and ponds, and if you go further, you run into the Alps. To the northwest, vineyards and rolling hills with naturally ochre colored stone for building constructions, and further west still the Loire river valley and then, the Massif Centrale, dormant volcanoes which make up a small, low, mountain-like range. Not to mention due south, where you can find prehistoric caves, or the north where you eventually leave the Beaujolais vineyards for Burgundy vineyards. All of these changes are within about a 2 hours drive of Lyon. But it's not only landscape we're dealing with, it's also regional identity, and of course food. Eac...
3 comments
Read more