About 535,000 students in the first grades of general or technology classes take written French on Friday, starting the 2024 graduation, which will continue on Tuesday with philosophy for high school seniors.
For the French language exam, which will start at 8:00 a.m. (until 12:00 p.m.), 390,129 candidates in the general direction and 145,294 in the technological direction were registered.
For the general exam, they will have to choose between an essay and a text comment, and for a technology exam, between a comment and a summary of the text associated with the essay.
Dissertation and essay from the technological sector refer to the text of the program, which consists of four main literary genres: novels, poetry, theater and literature of ideas. For each genre, students studied one work, among the three suggested.
Thus, for a novel, we could study
- “Manon Lescaut” (1731) by Abbé Prévost,
- “La Peau de chagrin” (1831) by Balzac or “Sido” (1929) by Colette;
- “Le Cahier de Douai” (1893) by Arthur Rimbaud,
- “La Rage de l’expression” (1952) by Francis Ponge or
- “My Forests” (2021) by Hélène Dorion for poetry.
For the literature of ideas, the program includes
- “Gargantua” (1534) by Rabelais,
- “Les Caractères” (1688) by La Bruyère and
- “Declaration of the Rights of Women and Citizens” (1791) by Olympe de Gouges.
This year, the theater offered
- “The Conceited Patient” (1673) by Molière,
- “Les Fausses confidences” (1737) by Marivaux and
- “Juste la fin du monde” (1990) by Jean-Luc Lagarce.
The written exam in the French language has a coefficient of 5 in the general and technological parts.
After the writing, there is an oral exam in French, also with a coefficient of 5 and covering the same texts. The dates of the oral exam are determined by each academy.
The number of texts on the program for this exam has been reduced from 20 to a total of 16 this year.
Final year students will begin their matriculation written exams on Tuesday morning with philosophy.
They will then take specialized written tests from June 19 to 21, followed by a large oral test between June 24 and July 3.
AFP