by Partager cet article Logically, the question of selection at university entrance and the well-known software, the APB (Admission Post-Baccalaureat), used to organise the orientation and allocation in higher education of some 700,000 baccalaureate holders each year in France, should rank high in the debates in the coming electoral year. One sure sign is that while associations of secondary school pupils are struggling to finally access the source code of the software, the subject has just entered the world of fiction. In the TV series ‘Baron noir’, a somewhat dismal left wing president attempts to improve his social image by defending quotas for vocational baccalaureates in the IUTs (University Institutes of Technology). Tough luck: some young up-market socialists, anxious to defend the general baccalaureate, infiltrate the general assemblies and derail the whole endeavour. Let me be clear: the attitude of the Ministry of National Education on this dossier is absolutely disgraceful. It maintains extreme opacity concerning the criteria used in the software and the information released is very limited, despite regular promises to be more transparent which are never fulfilled.
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Logically, the question of selection at university entrance and the well-known software, the APB (Admission Post-Baccalaureat), used to organise the orientation and allocation in higher education of some 700,000 baccalaureate holders each year in France, should rank high in the debates in the coming electoral year. One sure sign is that while associations of secondary school pupils are struggling to finally access the source code of the software, the subject has just entered the world of fiction. In the TV series ‘Baron noir’, a somewhat dismal left wing president attempts to improve his social image by defending quotas for vocational baccalaureates in the IUTs (University Institutes of Technology). Tough luck: some young up-market socialists, anxious to defend the general baccalaureate, infiltrate the general assemblies and derail the whole endeavour.
Let me be clear: the attitude of the Ministry of National Education on this dossier is absolutely disgraceful. It maintains extreme opacity concerning the criteria used in the software and the information released is very limited, despite regular promises to be more transparent which are never fulfilled. This is all the more regrettable because the APB (post-baccalaureate admission) system could enable us to bring this long-standing French dispute over the question of selection at the university to a successful conclusion.
The facts are as follows: in matters of access to higher education, France is characterised by the coexistence of a hyper-selective model (i.e. the classes preparing the entry examination to the elite colleges known as the ‘grandes écoles’, which are richly endowed) and a university sector which is supposed to be perfectly egalitarian (all those who have the baccalaureate are supposed to have access, with no selection, but this sector is very poorly endowed). The APB or post-baccalaureate admission process sheds the full light of day on the contradictions of the system: secondary school pupils list their choices by order of preference in the software (preparatory classes for entry to ‘grandes écoles’, universities, university institutes of technology (IUT)), the selective streams rank the pupils applying, but the universities cannot rank anything at all. However, in practice, there are endless exceptions and ways of tinkering in the system which are never publicly admitted to by the Ministry. When there are too many applicants, a random drawing of lots is blithely resorted to, whereas one could take into consideration objective criteria like marks, distance from the teaching institution, or a clear aim of social diversity, or else a conscious combination of all these criteria. Students are left to crowd into overloaded first years, like in medicine, before a drastic selection is carried out at the end of the first year where the prime criteria for success is often the capacity of parents to pay for private tuition in lieu and place of crowded lecture theatres. In 2013, elected members voted a scheme aimed at reserving places in selective options for the best pupils from poorer lycées (high schools). But this scheme has never been seriously evaluated and the way in which it is configured in the APB is totally unclear.
This opacity can last no longer. It is all the more tragic as the APB system, if it was properly applied and set up politically after a wide-ranging public and contradictory debate, could be a wonderful tool for social diversity and equality of opportunity. In material terms, the universities should be able to choose the objective criteria of marks and the most appropriate subjects for each option. But the public authorities must guarantee a place to every holder of the baccalaureate and above all, must be able to insert into the APB clear social and geographical criteria to offset the effect of the marks and to achieve a legitimate aim of diversity and equality; in complete transparency.
An example of this type of policy is moreover provided by the Affelnet system which has organised the allocation of post-junior high school (collège) students to senior high schools (lycées) since 2008. The system takes into consideration marks, which are assigned 600 points but adds 300 points for students with grants (approximately 15% of the families with the lowest incomes); this has enabled a significant increase in social diversity. The system could however be improved and also suffers from a blatant lack of transparency. The 300 points attributed to grant-aided students enable their access to the best senior high schools (lycées), almost independently of the marks obtained which can have undesirable effects. This could be offset by allocating 200 or 100 points to the pupils who are slightly better off. In particular, the attribution of these points should stop as soon as the aim of social diversity has been achieved; for example if all the grant-aided students have requested the same senior high school (lycée). Despite warnings, the Ministry has refused to correct this obvious bug in the system. As a result, at the start of the 2016 school year, some senior high schools (lycées) are going to find that 80% of their pupils are grant-aided, which means a level of social segregation higher than anything observed before the reform. At a time when the government is considering extending the Affelnet system to promote social diversity at junior high school (collège) level, it is more than time to accept discussion of this issue.
We should add that the issue is also international: the aim is to promote a European model for equality and justice in access to education. In the United States, where private universities reign supreme, selection is done on financial grounds, enrolment fees and even gifts from wealthy parents without the State finding anything to criticize. The principle of free access to education is well established in France, as it is in Germany or in Sweden. But this does not obviate the need to set up a just and efficient system of allocation procedures. Let us not waste the opportunities of this alternative model by replacing private arbitrariness with public opacity.