training sessions for the Grand oral exam of the baccalaureate, which is still struggling to find its place

From Monday, Terminale students will be called for the Grand oral exam of the baccalaureate. Franceinfo attended training sessions in the Paris region.

The release is approaching for the 540,000 Terminale students, in the middle of the baccalaureate week. While the written specialty tests are in progress, there is still the Grand oral, from Monday June 24 and until July 3. Each candidate must present, before a jury of teachers, a subject that they have prepared in advance. This year, there was very little time to practice in class, so revision was organized until the last moment. Training sessions are organized in many establishments, such as at the international high school of Noisy-le-Grand in the Paris region.

It is on a voluntary basis that students return to class in an empty high school, even though classes are over. Dorian, 17, is standing, facing the jury, to present his math problem. “How does the interior of an object appear paintable despite its infinite contour? This problem is called the painter’s paradox…”

Each student must prepare two topics during the year, one of which is drawn at random on the big day. The idea is to find a theme that is interesting for the teenager but which addresses many of the concepts of the program. In maths, some people talk for example about Spiderman, overbookings, or even the stock market or traffic jams. There are ten minutes of presentation then ten minutes of discussion with the two teachers.

The exercise doesn’t impress Dorian that much, he is rather comfortable speaking: “We train with the teachers and then I also like to train with my family, sometimes I even invite my neighbors because they get different feedback from the teachers.”. For this final training, the teachers still provide some advice. “You’ll have to practice doing it calmly at home with a stopwatch.”says one. “Use your hands too to describe what you are talking about”adds the other.

If the final adjustments are made until the last moment, it is also because the teachers have not had much time to train their students in class. Particularly this year, with the specialty written tests postponed to June, as maths teacher Natalia Fontaine explains.

“We had less time to work on the Grand Oral. In previous years, we spent time during class hours doing orals in front of the whole class. We didn’t have that time and we waited stopping classes to be able to offer them mock orals.”

Natalia Fontaine, high school teacher

at franceinfo

The Grand Oral has existed for four years, but it is far from unanimously accepted in the teaching community. The event is still struggling to find its place, testifies his colleague Quentin Dupré: “The Grand oral is often put aside a little by students, perhaps also for reasons of coefficient. It is not yet the big test which ends the baccalaureate.” This does not prevent the teacher from training his students in speaking from second grade, to work on these skills in the long term.