Ah, the French System ...

French universities are notably different from other academic institutions I have known. I was just talking about it with my friend F last night. We studied in the same schools, encountered the same problems, thus are brothers in arms, sort of ...

For one thing, students in France don't have any contact with the professors. Professors just walk into the auditorium, perform their lecture, then leave. That’s all you ever see of them. Where I come from, professors go by their first name. A peer relation between a student and a professor is unfathomable in France.

Secondly, universities do not provide services to you. You should be thankful in the first place that they let you in, but don’t you dream of asking for something that does not conform with the standard curriculum, also: forget about ever obtaining souvenirs from your stay, like transcripts of exams passed, grades received, or certificates. These are only delivered sporadically, and only if it suits the institution involved.

The French are decades behind in computer matters. They will make you learn, theoretically, how one works; you can study Turing machines, formal languages and automation theory but you may have to wait until way into your doctoral studies before you actually get to see one. Computer, I mean. Last time I knew, Internet or computer access was not automatically provided to students. I had to fight, reason and bully my way to get a computer account when I was in my fifth year, and the terminals in use in the only open terminal facility (unventilated!) on campus were ten years old.

The same applies to the housing, actually. Buildings are put up, but not given any maintenance, like repainting, cleaning or whatsoever. In the highest ranked university of France, the staircases smell of urine. If the glass in a window breaks it won’t be replaced, no matter how cold it gets. If a student spills coffee on a his desk, the stain will still be there three years later, next to the dirty sketch he penciled in out of boredom.

For decades the French have kept to an educational system that doesn’t have a counterpart anywhere else in the non-francophone world, their diplomas of DEUG, licence, maitrise and DEA (to name but a few) having no equivalent outside of France. This in itself does not facilitate comparisons, but as if things weren’t hard enough they also have to keep a unique grading system, where grades are usually appointed by “mentions”: très bien, bien, assez bien, passable, … However, should the grades be numerical, they will be on the scale of 0 to 20. Nota bene, the grade 20 is never accorded. Actually, the grade 18 is hardly ever accorded. To tell the truth, grades above 14 are very rare and most students will always be accorded a mark between 8 and 12. Except in math where most of the grades will be in the range between 3 and 10. These grades may not look impressing when translated into the standard scale of 0 to 10 or 100, but the French believe that low grades will help motivate the students.

Finally, French students never talk about studying, but “working”. They are always “working”! Just as well, because once they get a position within the public system and start working, they probably won’t be doing that much work, really …