This year, will the President of the Republic or the Ministry of National Education once again, following the baccalaureate exams, be the recipients of one of the many petitions that have been popping up since the early 2000s? One of the most recent petitions, with nearly 25,000 signatures, called for a reassessment of the physics-chemistry exam for the 2025 general baccalaureate, which was deemed to be more difficult than the level expected by the curriculum.

This type of request, which undermines the principle of the examination boards’ autonomy, is becoming common practice and affects many disciplines. In 2024, the economics and social sciences curriculum for the specialized exam was similarly criticized as being too demanding. The 2015 French exam question, based on the play *The Blue Tiger of the Euphrates* (by Laurent Gaudé, 2002), was challenged because the excerpt provided did not make it clear whether the reference was to an animal or to the river in the Middle East.

The standards for grading exams have themselves been the subject of criticism, such as that expressed in a 2008 petition calling for leniency in penalizing spelling errors, which were seen as threatening to set an entire generation back.

This reference to a youth at risk is a recurring theme in the texts submitted for signature. One can see this as a strategy—that of giving broad scope to a protest that might concern only a portion of the applicants. For our part, we see it as a reflection of the mistrust felt by a large segment of the youth, who are aware of the growing importance of academic credentials and concerned that the school system might not live up to the meritocratic promise it has made to them.

In a context that has been described as the “decline of the institution, ” these young people—sometimes with the support of their families on social media—refuse to accept the judgments that schools may pass on them and do not hesitate to challenge, by appealing to a higher authority, a system that puts them to the test under conditions they consider questionable.

Present a personal interpretation

Let’s take a look at a petition addressed to the President of the Republic the day after the 2019 French exam, which was signed by more than 54,000 students or parents.

A certain Jean Valjean criticizes the choice, for the commentary, of a poem by Andrée Chédid, “Destination: Tree,” taken from the collection *Tant de corps et tant d’âme*, which he considers too difficult and too far removed from what was taught during the school year. This topic, supposedly outside the curriculum, would have cost the students “several hundred hours of studying […] only to be met with the unknown”: the works of this contemporary author are reportedly never studied in class, and she also happens to have a masculine first name.

However, these fears and Jean Valjean’s arguments can be dispelled simply by reading the 11th-grade French curricula, which define not authors to be familiar with, but rather subjects of study. Andrée Chedid’s poem is entirely consistent with the topic titled “Poetic Writing and the Quest for Meaning, from the Middle Ages to the Present.” As for the official definition of the commentary exam, it stipulates that “the candidate writes an essay that presents, in an organized manner, what they have retained from their reading, and justifies their interpretation and personal judgments.” (BO No. 7 of October 6, 2011)

Prior knowledge of the author is not necessary to analyze a text, and the fact that some people mistook her for a man is by no means a disaster. Furthermore, the range of acceptable interpretations is explicitly stated in the national guidelines for exam graders, which specify that points should be awarded for “an analysis organized around a coherent reading strategy” and “the analysis of literary devices interpreted with subtlety.”

The petition’s call for candidates to be graded based on their ability to “explain” the text and structure their commentary aligns almost exactly with these instructions…

So there is something paradoxical about this petition, since it challenges the choice of a text that fits well within the curriculum and makes demands that correspond to what academic authorities actually require of graders. It would therefore simply be a matter of misunderstanding what is expected on the exam. But based on our research, the problem seems much more complex to us.

Candidates' Perspectives, Readers' Perspectives

We believe such misunderstandings stem from the fears that French students, in particular, experience when it comes to personally engaging with school assignments. In our various surveys, we see a significant group of them behaving primarily as “test-takers” whose main goal is to achieve a passing grade by demonstrating that they know how to structure an assignment, recall information, and, above all, avoid expressing a personal point of view.

The “students” see this more as a way to learn how to understand a text by identifying the literary devices used in it and by sticking to a presumed correct interpretation.

The much smaller group of “readers” consists of young people who are willing to go beyond exam anxiety and the typical student mindset. For them, analyzing literature is an opportunity to enrich and give meaning to their own experiences. They view literary knowledge simply as a tool to help them engage with the text.

In contrast, the “candidates” say they want to avoid taking any risks that could cost them points. For them, signing such a petition is likely a way to take control of the test by reducing it to a purely recall-based exercise.

Evaluative pressure

We conducted research interviews with candidates who had written an essay on Andrée Chedid’s poem and signed the petition. Freed from the pressure of being evaluated, several of them then took the text and interpreted it in their own personal way: Oxane, for example, interprets the tree as a symbolic representation of a foreigner in an unwelcoming city. She draws on her own experience with discrimination: the tree is like “a person who feels out of place; it resonates with me because, just because of my skin color, people sometimes judge me.”

The high school student is particularly struck by the poem’s reference to “leaves that have long since withered” because it’s “as if we had dreams in our heads of coming here, and in the end, when we return to reality, those dreams have faded a bit.” She thus carries out the personal interpretation she didn’t think she was allowed to make on the exam and connects it to a reference in the text, thereby—without realizing it—validating the exam’s expectations.

Signing the petition—even though the text had deeply moved her—likely allowed her to express her confusion about what was expected of her. Her case and many others suggest that we should probably not take the specific issues raised by these petitions at face value, but rather understand them more broadly as an expression—in the face of the pressure of standardized tests—of a deep sense of unease among high school students.