When I arrived in France for my semester abroad in the fall of 2022, I had the opportunity to take two musicology classes (musicology is the academic study of music in its social context) at the Sorbonne, a famous and long-standing Parisian university. I was immediately struck by several differences between the way my Sorbonne classes worked and my experience at my home university in Wisconsin – it turns out that my experience was not unique in that way, as there are many differences between an American education and a French one.
One huge milestone for most French students is the “bac” (short for baccalauréat). The bac is a standardized series of exams that students in France take at the end of high school, which allows them to receive their high school diploma (which is also, confusingly, called a baccalauréat) and strongly influences their future course of study and eventual profession. Each student ends up with a final composite bac score which is composed of their class grades in subjects such as history, science and civics during the final two years of high school (which are called the classe première and classe terminale), and their scores on a series of exams on additional subjects (including, notably, philosophy).
