This Tuesday, the 740,601 candidates for the bac will know the verdict of tights. Even struck by the health crisis, this 2020 edition without copy and without examination, the results of which are based only on the continuous assessment notes, will not be without suspense: some of the students could be happy surprised to discover averages superior, in fine, to those appearing in their report cards.
Connoisseurs of the mysteries of the system expect the results to be above the scores usually obtained in early July, before the oral catch-up. In 2019, 77.7% of candidates (all fields combined) obtained the diploma in the "first group" results. After catching up, 88% won it - including nine out of ten candidates in the general route.
"Do not worry too much," reassured a headmaster, mid-May, facing a student with the reports in theory too dull to escape the oral draft. In practice, he could get his bachot the first time. The miracle has a name: harmonization commissions.
Different doses of caring
These bodies, which have just completed their work, ensure each year of equity between the candidates, by improving the corrected copies more dryly than the average, or by gratifying the good candidates with missing points to reach 10/20 or a mention. This year’s work is more central than ever: until March, the teachers evaluated their students without knowing that their verdicts would count directly for the bac. But the Covid epidemic, the confinement, and the near-closure of high schools went through there. In these circumstances, the juries are in a way responsible for adapting the marks for the exam, while blurring the gaps between more or less severe high schools.
But in this game, the juries did their “cooking” with sometimes very different doses of benevolence. “In my jury, we had set ourselves to put up to 20 more points (out of 700) to the candidates, but among my colleagues, some were limited to 10 points, others to 30…” sighs Myriam, member of a jury of Terminale L in Ile-de-France, who still can't get over having “given the mention Pretty good to a student who was 11.4 / 20, simply because on his booklet, his teachers find it nice and that he participates in the theater club ... We played the rise at all costs. "
Another aspect bristles with some of the juries: although common rules have been enacted for harmonization, some establishments have chosen to take the lead ... by inflating themselves, and gently, the results.
Big thumbs up for some
Nicolas, professor of geography history at the Academy of Versailles thus saw "passing class averages to 19/20 in English, or 16/20 in history". Unheard of for the teacher, who sees the seal of cheating. "In my high school, we did not change the scores," he pests. And to concede: "It is not abnormal to go up grades, because it is obvious that we grade more severely during the year than for the bac. The problem is that some students have benefited from big boost, and not others. "
Amélie, an English teacher at the Nice Academy, says that a large public high school in her region "went from 11/20 on average in the bac last year, to 14/20". The members of the sub-jury who worked alongside her "noticed a discrepancy between the notes entered on the school book and those entered in the Lotanet software", used for the bac.
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While the Ministry of National Education brushed aside three weeks ago the existence of these abuses, the Director General of School Education, Edouard Geffray, admits that "very specific questions" on the subject have been raised with the administration in recent days. "In this case, you have to open the files, and give the starting notes to do the deliberative work," he recommends.
The instructions did not reach Nicolas: "the juries are there to raise the marks, not lower them," he understood. Christine, in the Paris Academy, who suspects 3 of the 13 high schools examined in her jury to have inflated the candidates' grades with helium, was invited by the president of the jury to report the suspected cases. “I didn't do it because I didn't feel fit, in terms of criteria and legitimacy, to designate cheating. Myriam, on the other hand, "readjusted from the bottom" certain notes, taking away "between 10% and 15%".
"We are witnessing this in a somewhat helpless manner," comments Hubert Salaün, president of the association of parents of PEEP pupils. If establishments have decided to give the bac, this is not a service rendered to students for the rest of their studies. "But it is perhaps a service rendered to the institution itself: in the midst of a high school reform, in which everything - subjects, classes, programs - changes next year," nobody has an interest in what 'there are repeaters, confides Myriam. It will be the Chinese puzzle to resettle in the new system those who knew the old regime bac. "
