For this new school year, a notable change awaits all middle school students who are going to take their brevet. This will be decisive for obtaining their diploma…
This year, the start of the school year will be special for thousands of students. If your child is entering the third grade, they are directly concerned. Indeed, on June 26, the Ministry of National Education published its back-to-school circular for the 2024-2025 school year, detailing the priorities, new features and experiments that will be implemented in schools, particularly for the national brevet diploma (DNB).
Indeed, this new measure, which is maintained despite the current political context, will be decisive for obtaining the diploma of thousands of middle school students. This was also predictable. Faced with the results of candidates for the brevet in 2024 which were less good than in 2023 (85.6% in the general series, down 3.5 points compared to the previous year, and 75.1% in the professional series, down 3 points), the authorities decided to react to raise the level and “bringing each student to the highest level of their abilities”The latest examinations have notably presented “strong territorial disparities, but also a distortion between the results of continuous assessment and those obtained in the final exams”underlines the circular of the ministry.
So, after removing the academic corrections, which allowed teachers to artificially raise exam grades a posteriori, it was decided for the 2025 session that the final exams will now count for 60% of the final exam grade. Previously, the scale was divided into two equal parts 50/50: 400 points for continuous assessment and 400 points for the final exams (French, mathematics, science, history geography and moral and civic education, and the oral history of the arts). The remaining 40% will therefore be dedicated to continuous assessment. A change that is not so trivial…
“This development of the certificate aims to reaffirm its value as a national diploma and to more faithfully sanction the mastery of the core skills”, indicate the authorities in their document. Some students who had difficulties in certain subjects will therefore have to redouble their efforts to obtain the maximum number of points. They will no longer be able to rely solely on continuous assessment to obtain the average for the brevet.
As for the publication of the official texts containing these new features, the press service of the Ministry of National Education assured us that “their publications had to be postponed due to current affairs” but that they should “come into force for the 2025 National Brevet Diploma.”