Baccalaureate specialty tests: “We sail on sight”, worries the SNES-FSU union of the Toulouse academy
The 2022 baccalaureate specialty written exams are held from Wednesday 11 to Friday 13 May. It will be a first. A “novelty” which raises questions and concerns on the side of the Snes-FSU union of the Toulouse academy.
The 2022 baccalaureate specialty written exams will be held from Wednesday May 11 to Friday May 13 for more than 523,000 general and technological high school students.
Initially scheduled for March, they were postponed, responding to a request from the teachers’ unions. “This report was a common sense measure given the health situation and the delay taken by the students with the Covid. With between three weeks and a month of learning lost, the two-month report was reasonable”, estimates Pierre Priouret , general secretary of the Snes-FSU, the first secondary school teachers’ union, of the Toulouse academy.
“It’s a bit of a leap into the unknown”
It will be the first time since the launch of the baccalaureate reform that these new tests will take place, the continuous assessment having inherited them in 2020 and 2021 because of the health situation linked to Covid-19. “It’s a bit of a leap into the unknown even if on some sample ‘zero’ topics to get an idea of the questions that can be asked.”
Subjects “arranged” with, in certain subjects, several subjects to choose from, “so that the student does not come across a point in the program that he could not have seen”, specifies Sylvain Lagarde, academic secretary of Snes-FSU of the Toulouse Academy and head of the local high school.
The organization of the tests and their correction also raise several questions from the members of the union. The organization of the tests being defined by the establishments, over the three days stopped, “some can start at 8 a.m., others at 8:30 a.m. We are therefore obliged to multiply the subjects”, explains Sylvain Lagarde. An additional difficulty for corrections and which, for Pierre Priouret “raises a concern for fairness, because everyone will not have the same subject”.
Four half-days of discharge to correct the copies
The teachers correcting the tests could ask for four half-days of discharges to dispense with it, between May 17 and June 3. Corrections that will be “done in a dematerialized way, on a computer, explains Sylvain Lagarde. The copies are scanned by the establishment staff and then corrected via a dedicated application. Which is an additional burden for them, in a period where the establishments operate normally, with all the students. And all the correctors must have a computer with a good connection, that there is no problem with scanning…”
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“We sail on sight and within tight deadlines, that’s what’s complicated,” laments Pierre Priouret. “It seems unnecessarily complicated compared to what existed before, not being as fair. We have always asked to return to the old bac formula: over a week, everyone with the same subjects for a question of fairness. There, there has been a multiplication of innovations and not asked in the direction of simplification. We have some concerns, even if it is not going to ask to go badly, he temporizes. Above all, we don’t want the students to be penalized at the end.”