Back to bac

摘要

IT WAS by imperial decree that Napoleon founded the French baccalaureat, the country's school-leaving exam, in 1808. To this day, some 700,000 pupils still take the bac, the great majority of the annual age cohort. It has become the badge of excellence for a French lycee system that offers a model of globally standardised education, including to over 900 lycees with a total of 330,000 pupils abroad. Yet President Emmanuel Macron is now about to announce the most radical overhaul of the exam for over half a century. Why?