Agrégation

In France, the agrégation (French pronunciation: ​[aɡʁeɡasjɔ̃]) is the most pretigious and selective civil service competitive examination for the public education system. The laureates are known as agrégés. A similar system exists in other countries.

Due to the difficulty and the selectivity of this competitive exam, its preparation often requires a full year of preparation.

There are actually two different agrégations: an agrégation for secondary education, leading to the position of professeur agrégé, and an agrégation for professorships in some disciplines of higher education.

Secondary education

The main agrégation, and the most famous one, leads the candidates to the position of professeur agrégé in the secondary education. The difficulty and selectivity (number of available positions) vary between the various disciplines: there are about 300 such positions open each year in mathematics, but usually less positions for humanities and social sciences (say only around 20 for philosophy for instance), and perhaps only one seat in some rarely taught foreign languages such as Japanese. The professeurs agrégés constitute a higher category of teachers compared to the professeurs certifiés, recruited through the CAPES. In theory, the agrégés are expected to teach at high school level lycées) and also at university, while the certifiés teach in junior high schools (collèges), though there is significant overlap.

In addition to the vast majority of agrégés teaching in lycées, some agrégés teach in the preparatory classes to the grandes écoles. Finally some agrégés teach in normal universities, but do not, nominally, do scientific research as normal university academics do; these positions are known as PRAG. Some similar but temporary positions (agrégé préparateur, AGPR), including research, exist in the écoles normales supérieures, though these are obviously very few and very hard to obtain.

The agrégation is normally open only to holders of a 5-year university education (master) or above. There also exists an internal agrégation for professeurs certifiés, though it lacks the prestige of the external one. The following discusses the external one.

The competitive exam generally consists in a written session(admissibility), composed of numerous dissertations and anaylisis of documents, where most candidates are eliminated. The remaining candidates have then to go through an oral part (admission), composed of different oral exams where the candidate must demonstrate his or her ability to prepare and give lessons on any topic within the scope of his discipline. The oral exams provide the opportunity to verify that the candidates possesses the appropriate oral skills and masters the main exercises of their discipline : for example, in the Agrégation of Classics (French, Greek, Latin), candidates have to translate and comment on classical texts and texts from French literature. This is a way to establish whether the candidates are able to fulfill requirements that they are going to need to satisfy if they pass the cut.

In most disciplines, the lessons expected extend well above the secondary education level; indeed, the candidate may even have to present a lesson appropriate for the 2nd, 3rd or even 4th years of specialized courses at theuniversity level. One reason for that is that the agrégés should be able to teach in special undergraduate sections of high schools, known as preparatory classes to the grandes écoles and very similar in nature to grammar schools, where the level may be far above the normal level of first or second year college education.

The agrégation is also used as an unofficial national ranking system for students, giving a fair comparison between students of different universities. This is especially true in the humanities, where the agrégation is highly selective and supposedly demonstrates erudition of the candidate.

Students of the écoles normales supérieures often dedicate an entire year of their curriculum to prepare for the agrégation.


List of agrégations for secondary education

Enseignement des langues vivantes
Lettres et sciences humaines
Économie
Enseignement des sciences naturelles et physiques
Enseignement professionnel et technique
Enseignements artistiques
Enseignement d'éducation physique

Higher education

In some disciplines of higher education such as law, legal history, political science, economics, management, there exists an agrégation for the professorship positions, called agrégation de l'enseignement supérieur. In this competitive exam, the candidate also has to give several lessons in front of a committee.[1] Usually there are three lessons, spread over several months, except in economics, where there are only two lessons. The first and the last lessons have to be prepared alone, during eight hours, in a library of basic titles selected by the committee. For the remaining lesson, when it exists, the candidate has a full 24 hours to prepare for the examination, and may use several libraries as well as a team of "helpers" (usually doctoral candidates or fellow candidates, but never full professors).

Some anticonformist sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu have argued that this exam measures a candidate's social connections as much their ability to present a lesson, especially considering the composition of the examining committee.

List of agrégations for higher education

Well known agrégés (and discipline)

See also

References

  1. ↑ Official text organizing the French "agrégation de l'enseignement supérieur"

Further reading

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