Le Bac

France 2's Le 20 Heures newscast has been doing their annual in-depth coverage of le Bac, the graduation exams that French secondary students take before (and to qualify for) moving to university or various skilled vocations. There seem to be about as many bacs as there are, say, college majors—tests in construction or wetlands management or cooking as well as the sciences, math, psychology, etc. The tests are spread out over a week or two, which makes for lots of coverage of students preparing (preferred shot: group of students lounging on the lawn like so many high school seniors, but boning up on their last-minute Sartre).

The odd thing to me is the level of scuriny the exam gets every year on the news. It seems comparable to what my friends and I gave when we were taking the SATs—chatting about possible questions, quizzing each other about how we did after it's over. But then again, we were the ones directly involved. With the bac, which has a much more centralized (c'est France after all), one-time-only nature, there's more of the sense of a rite of passage.

Yesterday was the philosophy bac, which I think is one of the media's favorites. Students have to write essays on topics like "can there be happiness" ... so every year France 2 gets a bunch of real philosophers to take the test along with the students, and then compares their answers ("the pursuit of happiness is problematic and ends in futility"). Imagine if we in the US had our public intellectuals all write SAT essays every year to lead on the nightly news (and in a legislative election week)!

Here are some video clips from yesterday's mid-day news. The evening one had the actual questions but I can't find it:

Le bac démarre avec l'épreuve de philosophie ( JT 12/13 - 11/06/2007 )
Cinq écrivains et l'épreuve philo du bac ( JT13h - 11/06/2007 )