Drownout France

BAC, the SAT Egalité?

A kid reports home, on TF1. 3 Juillet.

The Stanford-Binet Test is probably the most famous of intelligence tests (Derived from the Binet-Simon test of French psychologist Binet and his colleague Simon, and developed by Lewis Terman at Stanford, who was in turn the father of Fred Terman. They named an engineering building after Fred because he is often cited as the father of Silicon Valley, who as dean of engineering encouraged his students--including Dave Hewlett and Bill Packard--to go off and start companies. Unrelated but interesting is that Stanford University (known as "The Farm") is on the former site of former-CA-governor, railroad tycoon, and founder of the CA wine regions, Leland Stanford's farm, was the very same place where Eadweard Muybridge took the famous photos of horses on the gallop, to settle a bet between Stanford and some chums: is there a point mid gallop when all the horses feet are off the ground? (Yes.) Stanford ripped him off in the end, taking full credit in the book published from the discoveries. Sad. Apparently LS was also a malefactor of great wealth, having gotten rich on scamming the government and his British investors with the railroad project.)

Intelligence testing is something not well-regarded by most psychology today, and the US has drifted away from it. One would think this had passed in France too. It sort of seems not.

I say this because the BAC results came in on Friday. The BAC, being the baccalaureate exams administered throughout France. There were sleepless nights for parents and pupils the night before, because this is one important test.

There used to be something called the "elevens" (I think; corrections anyone?) in the UK which were much reviled and eliminated. Essentially a general aptitude test given early in your adolescent career, and by which your future life was determined. One gets this feeling with the SAT, since it seems to be so important (but isn't really when you get down to really fine-grained discriminations). Even the SAT seems crazy as it is.

But the BAC is more than a little test. At the end of high school, you take this wide-ranging and complex test of essays and multiple-parts that aspires to demonstrate your achievement across wide ranges: sciences, languages, etc. Many people don't pass at all and historically the number was around 50% of people that completed the BAC. It was a significant achievement and presumably the sort of thing that a "college education" used to be in the US. But socialist (!) governments through the 1980s pushed that up (remember Mitterand's hostilities to the Reagan Right?) to about 75%.

So everybody gets a BAC.

But that's not it, since the BAC also determines--entirely on its own--where you will be accepted to college. If you get above 18 (out of 20) you're into the grands ecoles (which are the six ultra-elite semi-vocational-style schools such as the Science Po, HAC, Ecole Normale Superiure, and so on). If you get between 16 and 18, then you go to school for two more years to get your score up! And then, 10% of the re-takers are admitted to the elites. The rest go to the liberal universities--including the very old and famous Sorbonne which apparently isn't as prestigious as we think it is.

And if you fail the BAC, well then you can go to a private "alternative school" (sort of like the Devry or Apex Tech option I think). That is, because all the higher education in this country is run by the state and free to attend (Hope Grants my ass!).

It's not exactly an intelligence test in the spirit of all the IQ chaps, but it does have an important symmetry: the idea that a single battery of tests is accurate enough to serve as the basis for irrevocably deep steering of a person's life. Not sure about that one myself.

Talk about egalité!

In a long article commenting on the situation--the education minister just appointed by Chircac (one Professor Luc Ferry, a philosopher and creditable one at that while also chum of SuperLiar; author of such inconceivable titles as "Man Made God" and "Why We Are Not Neitzscheans" as well as a critique of Deep Ecology. Imagine Andrew Card writing something!)--seemed to be arguing that the BAC should be made more important and more benefits bestowed on the high achievers.

Posted by amol at July 7, 2002 11:21 PM