Bringing Our American A-Game to France

The culture of grades and what matters when it comes to international education

There is an epidemic of A’s sweeping through American schools. Most recently the trend appeared in the New York Times piece Nearly Everyone Gets A’s at Yale. Does That Cheapen the Grade? where a reported 80 percent of all grades given to undergraduates were A’s or A minuses. Professors there say the trend has “scrambled the very meaning of grades themselves” and that “an A is the new normal.”

Straight A’s have permeated all levels of U.S. education. Last month the NYT guest essay If Everyone Gets an A, No One Gets an A included the 2016 statistic that 47 percent of American high school students graduated with A’s and the percentage continues to rise, especially in higher-income school districts. Meanwhile ACT scores are the worst in decades, meaning the increase in A’s does not reflect higher aptitude and better student performance (I encourage you to visit the article’s comment section for a wide array of reasons for the A epidemic and ways to solve it.)

Meanwhile, here in France, perfect grades are almost unheard-of, and that can be traced back to the exactitude and perfectionism of none other than Napoleon Bonaparte. Based on a general education concept developed by Maximilien Robespierre, Bonaparte established the baccalauréat exam in 1808. If you’re French you simply call it “le bac” (pronounced “back”) and it is the equivalent of a high school diploma. It is famously difficult, mostly based on rote memorization and calling for little creativity.¹ The brutality and precision of Napoleon’s military style lives on in the way the French grade the bac, and students in general. They use a scale of 0-20 called a “barème.” Anything over 10 is passing and allows students to obtain credits for a subject. Acceptance into competitive schools requires higher grades but a 10/20 gets the credit. This means French teachers are given room to be brutally honest with student assessments.

Imagine what it would take to get a perfect grade on anything from Professor Robespierre or Professor Bonaparte. There would certainly be no A+. That’s the situation in France. You have to be a borderline genius (and savant-like at memorization) to receive an overall grade between 18-20. It’s exceedingly rare. This can be shocking to American students and their parents. It certainly was to us.

Our eldest is 13 and responsible for educating her parents on how French public middle school or “collège” works. We were first surprised when she wasn’t getting perfect scores in English class until we realized they are teaching standard British English. Silly Americans, assuming the world spoke our language. Spelling the British way (e.g., “centre”) is essential. A “sweater” is called a “jumper” and you will be marked down for using the wrong word. Don’t even try to say or write “gotten.” Our daughter was also perplexed when she was asked to conjugate “to be” in English. She had never been asked to write it as a list and, in a panic, wrote “I be, You be, We be, They be…” The only native English speaker in her entire grade, she ended up with a shocking 16/20 in English. It was still the highest grade in the class.

After a semester of “très bien” written on tests in other subjects that were also confusingly covered in red ink corrections, we reviewed her first report card. She had a 15/20. We transposed our American grading system of F, C, B and A onto the French 0-20. We figured this 15/20 meant she barely got a B despite all the A-level, seemingly positive feedback she was getting. So I asked a French friend who teaches history to review the report.

“She got a 15? As a non-native speaker that is really impressive,” my friend said. I was still skeptical. 

“Let me explain it this way,” she went on, “in France, no one gets a 20. It’s impossible. Also, no one gets 19. No one gets 18. The best students get 17 or 16. A 15 is really good.”

Even the French embassy finds it necessary to reassure American students (and their parents) studying in France. They state that “grades over 14 are rarely given” and that anything “over 12 generally mean[s] the student is among the top 10 to 20 percent in the class.”

Americans need this Embassy-backed reassurance because our mostly-A’s grading system isn’t just about the grades. Grades can reflect our self-worth as parents.

The New York Times opinion piece Why Parents Can’t Quit the Elite College Arms Race contains a statistic from a national survey of 6,500 families. Eighty-three percent of parents agreed with the statement “Others think that my children’s academic success is a reflection of my parenting.” Read it again. And weep. Even some of the most privileged parents are willing to risk prison to ensure their children get into “good schools” and demonstrate that they are “good parents” to their communities.

American parents aren’t the only ones willing to risk legal consequences to get their kids good grades. Back in 2013, a 52 year old French mom dressed “in young people’s clothes” and sat the English section of her 19 year old daughter’s bac. She was charged with fraud and her daughter faced a multi-year ban on taking public exams. But in France the examples of cheating are sparse. There hasn’t been a Varsity Blues-level college admissions scandal yet.

While parents have tried and mostly failed at influencing grades, Covid has been brutally successful. The latest assessment of global education from The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows the Covid pandemic has resulted in “historic setbacks in reading and math” and that “declines in test scores [are] so widespread that the United States climbed in global rankings simply by falling behind less sharply,” according to USA Today. PISA reports that the educational “setbacks spanned nations rich and poor, big and small, with few making progress.” French students are struggling just as much as American students are flailing post-Covid.

But the difference is the French know this. In a country where hardly anyone got a perfect grade before Covid there are fewer As than ever. The educational setbacks are a reality reflected in real grades. Americans are mostly in denial. They see As on their kids’ report cards and think everything is better than ever. Meanwhile French teachers communicate brutally honest grades directly to older students through online portals that are updated daily. Sometimes they even read grades out loud in class (my brain goes into fight or flight at this concept)². I haven’t seen examples of how this mercilessly anti-coddling grading style is impacting student resilience. It might not be such a good thing. Time will tell. But for now, as a parent, I will take honesty over sugar-coated denial. I believe future educational results based on reality will create a stronger, egalitarian academic future for all French students.

Speaking of the future, as an American parent I felt pressure to focus on it. I was told that where my kids go to elementary school will ultimately affect where they go to high school and then university. I felt pressure to send my kids to increasingly unaffordable private schools (x4!) for their future success. I worried that their grades would matter to their future employers (as they did back when my husband was working for Google, a policy that seems to have been discarded to some degree along the way).

But then we moved to France and suddenly everything recalibrated. We were proud of the mere fact of successful attendance and absence of outright rebellion. We got our kids enrolled by speaking bad French and celebrated that and many other victories-over-bureaucracy with champagne. We figured out how to pay for their lunches with the damn online-portal-of-doom. We volunteered for field trips and learned what is considered an appropriate gift for teachers. We learned about French birthday parties and that the “Vie Scolaire” is weirdly run by the city and not the school. When you study abroad, and as parents we are certainly “studying,” getting good grades matters less and learning a culture matters more. We just ask that our kids try their best.

This week our 13 year old was positively giddy at 7:30am when she learned she scored a 17/20 on her French exam – the highest grade in the class. As the only non-native French speaker in the section, she was, I think, pretty justified in feeling proud of herself. She was actually glowing. Our 11 year old, not to be outdone and being the most French-like of the four, announced her 14/20 “c’est pas mal” or “isn’t too bad.”

Pas mal indeed.

UPDATE: I save lots of little pieces of paper to remember our time here. Here’s a good grade with “excellent travail” attached to some beautiful French handwriting from our big one. Very proud of her!

1. Bilingual students attending French schools can also take an English-intensive baccalaureate called the International French Baccalaureate (BFI).

2.  I am diagnosed with numeric dyslexia and ADHD and I grew up believing my steady stream of C’s were a way of surviving. I almost failed out of high school my freshman year and later failed two math classes in college. In those two cases the professors knew I was trying my very best so they bumped me to passing D’s. I clearly remember the handful of hard fought A’s I received, mostly in literature, writing and art, and treasured those moments. I was really proud of those few A’s. They helped shine a light on a path for me towards journalism and writing.