Comment: French education is obsessed with grades

“C’est noté?” my students ask whenever I announce a new task – “Will it be marked?” 

I know what they are really saying: if it isn’t marked, why bother doing it at all? 

“You should love learning for the sake of it,” I implore them; but most don't seem to understand what I am saying. 

Every year, one or two are caught cheating in exams but no one is surprised: if the only objective is a good mark in English, why go to the trouble of actually learning to speak the language? 

French education is obsessed with marking. It starts from an early age and never stops. 

When a student applies for higher education, for example, he or she is judged first on the mark out of 20 in his/her lycée graduation dossier. 

Only if it passes a certain threshold will the application be considered by the computer in charge of Parcoursup, the logarithm that decides who is eligible to go to any given education establishment. 

This number effectively dictates his future life chances. It could be called a premature score for life.

For some highly sought-after courses, students have to spend a whole year in prepa (preparatory) school, which means cramming for an entrance exam whether the work is useful or not.

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French target culture

It is a mindset that, once established, is hard to shift. It crops up everywhere. 

I know it happens elsewhere, but the French truly accelerate at deciding life chances by data points. 

If you want to rent a flat these days, you have to prepare a turgid dossier of credit-worthiness just to get the estate agent to ask the landlord if you can view the place.

I understand the reasoning behind this. Target or performance culture – the belief that a person can be reduced to objective statistics – has a virtue, at least theoretically, in that it is supposed to teach fairness and encourage hard work, but it leaves out the intangible human element altogether. And it has huge downsides.

Teach people that all that matters is passing exams and that is what they will specialise in. 

Young children who stumble at the first test in class will get the message that they are useless at that kind of thing and will reduce their expectations. Innumerable professions are closed off to the non-academic person.

Someone who performs well on paper, in controlled conditions, will advance at the expense of someone imbued with less measurable skills: a wholesome attitude, personality, creativity, compassion, etc. 

The bureaucracy, I have to say, is full of people who made the grade but lost their empathy along the way. 

They are the people who make forms so complicated for the rest of us: if they had to learn to get it exactly right, why shouldn't the rest of us? 

Dare I say that the result is seen at the top of politics and economics. 

The country is run by énarques who are, by definition, brainboxes who know how to play the system but not necessarily sympathetic and empathetic human beings. 

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French rules and regulations

I saw it also in some of my teaching colleagues, when I worked in the public university. They were numbed by rules and regulations and some of them were truly incapable of thinking out of the exam box. 

I made it my mission to encourage students not to go for marks but develop true interactive language skills. I noticed that the bright ones – the exam high-achievers – quickly got the message, but it was much harder to convince the strugglers who just wanted a good mark to take home to their parents.

Fortunately, there is something about French culture that provides an override to the exam obsession. 

Being a nice person with people skills is still prized and professionals who work with the public, in my experience, generally preserve their humanity and apply it as much as the system will allow them. 

I’d suggest that the state introduce a system by which those of us at the bottom of the social pile can mark the people we deal with for their use of soft skills – but then we’d just encourage the exam-passers to study hard to try to appear nice.

Do you have children in the French education system? Do you agree with Nick Inman that they face too many tests? Let us know at letters@connexionfrance.com