With a dissertation on poetry or a commentary on a text by Louise d’Épinay in the general way, the playwright Émile Augier or the literature of ideas in the technological way, the 530,000 first year students began working on Thursday June 11 on the writing of the French baccalaureate.
The 385,000 high school students in the general sector and 145,000 in the technological sector take the anticipated French baccalaureate test. They started working on their subjects at 8 a.m. and have until noon to submit their papers. “A little method, a little rereading, that will do it. Trust yourself,” assured the Minister of National Education Édouard Geffray during a trip to a high school in Clichy (Hauts-de-Seine).
In the general sector, high school students have the choice between a text commentary on an extract from the novel Histoire de Madame de Montbrillant by Louise d’Épinay (1818) and a dissertation on poetry, covering three works of their choice: Cahier de Douai by Arthur Rimbaud (1870), La rage de l’expression by Francis Ponge (1952) and Mes forêt by Hélène Dorion (2021).
For the technological route, they have the choice between a text commentary on an extract from the play Gabrielle by Émile Augier (1849) or an exercise in text contraction and an essay on a literary work with an argumentative aim (literature of ideas). For this subject, they had to work either on Discourse on voluntary servitude by Étienne de La Boétie (1576), or Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes by Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle (1686), or on Letters from a Peruvian woman by Françoise de Graffigny (1747).
“A requirement for quality”
For this test, as for the others, the emphasis will be particularly placed on “mastery of the language” and spelling, the minister has warned several times since May, only a few weeks before the baccalaureate. “When you take the baccalaureate and particularly the French baccalaureate, there is a requirement for overall quality of the language,” he recalled to the press on Thursday.
“We are not looking for spelling champions (…) But on the other hand, a copy which would obviously be written with a very problematic or very questionable level of language, quite simply, could not be average,” insisted Édouard Geffray. “This year, in all disciplines (…) there will be a scale which will specify in particular the expected language level and therefore the points to be removed,” he said. “I trust the correctors,” he assured, but “what I don’t want is for there to be intermediate instructions. »
French is one of the so-called final baccalaureate exams, which represent a total of 60% of the final baccalaureate grade, with 40% allocated to continuous assessment over two years. The French written test has a coefficient of 5 in the general and technological sections. It will be followed by an oral French exam, also with a coefficient 5 from June 22, depending on the academies. The students will continue on Friday morning with the new anticipated mathematics test, coefficient 2.
