A French end-of-school marking mix-up

The academic year is over in France, the baccalauréat exams have been sat and the results published, and students up and down the country have, depending on how they fared of course, been rejoicing (or not) and making plans for their future.

Except for around 800 of them in the Ile de France region, the area including and surrounding the capital, who received the wrong results and will have to wait a little longer to find out how they did.

Even the most brilliant of students can crack under exam pressure, but when around 800 end up with grades totally out of keeping with their academic records, suspicions are, not surprisingly, quickly roused.

Such has been the case in and around Paris over the past week, where the results of students having sat the baccalauréat, or bac as it's more "affectionately" and popularly known here, didn't quite tally with what had been expected.

Last Friday the results were published on the Internet, and there were some surprises, not necessarily pleasant ones, not just for the students, but also parents and teachers, in the results the French paper - of all things.

And among the schools left scratching their heads over what could have happened were some of the capital's most prestigious lycées including Henri IV, Louis-le-Grand, Claude-Monet and Stanislas.

"Around a dozen students rang to say how surprised they had been to find out that they hadn't done as well as they had expected," said Daniel Chapellier, the director of the Stanislas lycée.

"Similarly there were those who had pretty average results throughout the academic year who were surprised at how well they had done," he added.

Then there was the peculiarity of two students (again) from the Stanislas lycée, who were informed that they had been absent from the exams, even though they had in fact sat them!

A case not unfamiliar to those who remember a similar story covered here a couple of weeks ago.

A couple of anomalies and subsequent complaints might well be expected, especially as around 331,000 students sat the bac in France this year. But when there are around 800 cases, all concentrated in one particular area, there's likely to be something awry.

In stepped the le service interacadémique des examens et concours, which discovered that lo and behold there had indeed been a mistake in the marking process.

"Investigations show that the results entered by a person, not a machine, had been attributed to the wrong candidates," said Stéphane Kesler, the director for the Ile de France examination centre said on Thursday evening.

"It's unfortunate what has happened, but the error will be corrected and the proper results released as soon as possible."

So those 800 students will have to wait a little longer to find out exactly how they did, the previous set of results - released on the Internet - will not count, and obviously for some there'll be disappointment.

It surely makes those of us whose school years are a dim and distant recollection, glad that those days are behind us.