I was dismayed, after my first few weeks of classes in 2022, that professors in France are really tough graders – I never had any trouble getting good grades in the U.S., even at university, but in Paris I found myself struggling just to pass my exams. In France grades are always out of 20 points, where usually you need 10 out of 20 to pass a class. Somewhere between 12 to 14 out of 20 is an average grade, and only the most annoyingly smart students get a 17 or an 18. As far as I can tell, it is almost unheard of for a professor at any level to give someone a 20 out of 20 on anything. French education tends to place a strong emphasis on memorising basic information such as dates, facts, numbers, etc., as opposed to an American education which seems, at least to me, to stress memorising facts less and creative and original thinking more. This means for instance that my classmates at conservatory in Paris seem to know the birth and death years of many more composers that I do; my classmates at conservatory in Wisconsin on the other hand might often only have a fuzzy notion of when a composer lived and died, but they are very likely to have an interesting opinion on things like how that composer’s music was received and what it accomplished in its social context. Ideally, of course, it’s important to know both the cold hard facts of whatever it is one is studying and also to have an interesting opinion on why it all matters. I do think it’s interesting, however, to see how each country has its own unique attitude about which of those things to focus on first.
