The baccalaureate specialty exams will be held in June as soon as the school year begins, and no longer in March, a source familiar with the matter told AFP on Sunday, August 27, confirming information of Parisian.
According to the daily, Emmanuel Macron decided this week to return to part of the Jean-Michel Blanquer version of the baccalaureate. The Minister of Education Gabriel Attal must speak this Sunday on the 8 p.m. television news on TF1 and confirm these changes presented by this source as “calendar adjustments”, in accordance with the wishes expressed on Wednesday by the president.
“We had to find a solution to a major problem. This is good news, which corresponds to our request”, reacted to AFP Bruno Bobkiewicz, the secretary general of the National Union of National Education Management Staff. . In an interview on point earlier in the week, Emmanuel Macron had estimated that the bac exams, which started for the first time in 2023 in March, cannot be held “so early in the year”. The “new baccalaureate” as imagined by the minister at the time Jean-Michel Blanquer was only fully implemented in this 2023 edition, for the first time since the 2019 reform.
In March, the final year students took two specialty tests, that is to say the two major subjects chosen by each high school student in the high school year and which alone account for a third of the results of the baccalaureate. The grade for this exam is based 40% on continuous assessment and 60% on so-called final exams, including specialty exams, philosophy and the grand oral passed in the final class.
For Bruno Bobkiewicz, “it’s not completely a step back, we keep the logic of continuous control, with a necessary adjustment in view of what we have experienced”. The new formula baccalaureate calendar had aroused numerous criticisms from unions and parents of students on the holding of specialty tests so early in the school year, resulting in absenteeism and demotivation of some students in the last quarter.