second year for the grand oral, test still being run in

From Monday and for the second consecutive year, candidates for the general and technological baccalaureate take the final baccalaureate test, the grand oral. A test that still needs to be run in, after a year in which the organization had been criticized.

For this great oral test, the student can keep with him the draft that he wrote during the time of preparation of the subject, before his speech. The stakes are not negligible: it is marked with a coefficient of 10 in the general stream and 14 in the technological stream (out of a total of 100).

A “catastrophic organization”

For this test, the high school student arrives with two questions prepared with his teachers and relating to one or two of his specialties (history-geography, mathematics, etc.). The jury, made up of two professors, one of whom teaches one of the specialties, chooses a question. The oral then lasts 20 minutes, including 5 minutes of presentation, 10 of interview with the jury and 5 of discussion on his orientation project.

Last year, malfunctions were noted in the organization of this event, in a context greatly disrupted by the Covid, with in particular delays in sending invitations to students and teachers. For Cécile Suel, librarian professor in the Pas-de-Calais, “the organization was frankly catastrophic”. “In the establishment where I found myself, there was a problem of teachers who were not summoned,” she says.

PE teachers to assess… Maths

Some also say that colleagues had to pass subjects that were really foreign to them, such as PE teachers for math. Others were luckier, such as Thomas Dautais, professor of economics and social sciences (SES) in Loire-Atlantique, who passed the orals in his subject, had only 20 minutes by train to his place of examination and “found it very well organized”.

Several teachers point out that the great attraction of this test is to work on oral skills, which are often undervalued in France. But this is also where the shoe pinches, because students generally lack time in the year to work on these specific skills.

“It’s in the process of breaking in”

Same observation for Renaud, SES teacher in a high school in Seine-et-Marne: “we are so pressed for time throughout the year, to be able to finish the program, that we have no time to work the great oral”. “Throughout a student’s career, ie for 12 to 13 years, we don’t put the oral at all at the center of learning. And at the last moment, he is asked a bit treacherously to prepare an oral, ”he adds. Cécile Suel, the documentalist professor, regrets for her part that the students she saw pass “did not work more on their sources at the research level”.

“For the moment, we are still doing it quickly”, but “I hope that it will go up in quality”, she adds. “It’s being run in,” also believes Thomas Dautais. As for philosophy, the marks of the oral exam are taken into account in the average of the baccalaureate, the results of which will be published on July 5. Since its reform in 2019, the baccalaureate mark is 60% based on final tests. Last year, nearly 94% of candidates had won the baccalaureate.

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