It’s not unusual for students to complain about an exam… I’m sure most of us will have done that in our time. But I find it amazing that they get up petitions like this… 
Depends a bit whether the BACs are graded with “absolute” grades or whether the grade boundaries are adjusted so that, even though a paper might be a bit harder one year, the grades are about the same.
“Depends a bit whether the BACs are graded with “absolute” grades or whether the grade boundaries are adjusted so that, even though a paper might be a bit harder one year, the grades are about the same.”
They are marked out of 20. We don’t have grades. I am picking up my papers tomorrow (and have 10 days in which to mark them, results will be out on the 5th of July) the mark scheme may be out of however many points but the result will be expressed as n/20. All subject results are multiplied by their weightings, added together, divided by the number of subjects sat and that average will be the final overall mark for the Bac.
My daughter did that paper 
I object to exams that are too short on time, that favours people who can write quicker but not necessarily understand the subject so well.
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They had 4 hours for that paper.
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Fair comment, but deep understanding can be set out briefly but concisely. Long essays may be full of irrelevance and lack any meaningful grasp of topic
In full agreement provided the examination board set a fair paper. There are exams where the mantra is throw enough **** and some will stick. Favouring those who can write more of it. That undoes what you have just said as they won’t get marked down for pure guessing and showing a lack of knowledge but an ability to get more down and improve the chances of a pass
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If it is an absolute mark - which it sounds very close to being (some scope to tweak with “weightings”?) then the students probably have good cause to complain if it can be demonstrated that the paper is harder than previous years - do you not think?
Those marking may get an instruction to accept xyz in the answer, or not give fewer than n points for question xyz. That is about it. All the marking is anonymous and candidates are marked according to performance on the day.
I sit on the jury for the Bac, every year we get moaning about one subject or another, especially since social media make it so easy to get up a good head of steam, and every year we nod sympathetically and say as diplomatically as possible that that is life.
It is meant to be a bit demanding, it’s the Bac, you don’t get it collecting packet tops.
You never get any moaning if a particular subject has a doddle of a paper.
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Nod.
I think students moaning that exams are too hard goes back to at leat when I was doing my O’ and A’ levels (late 1970’s/early 1980’s) and probably well before that 
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It was the marking that was different as well.
Nowadays if you make one mistake in French that is it.
I failed my French because I made the same mistake in my writren piece and lost a mark every time.
If the purpose of an exam is to test a students knowledge and more importantly understanding of a subject then surely it’s only difficult for those that don’t have the necessary understanding. In that case they will obviously either fail or get a low mark because otherwise there would be no point to the test. And if the student doesn’t understand the subject then they either need to study further or drop the subject. The exception , perhaps, being literature or art where interpretation can be subjective.
Or am I being too simplistic?
Exactly, exams are meant to be (or they always used to be) challenging. If they were easy, we’d all have doctorates which would be totally worthless.
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Yep, being to simplistic 
I know this is about the BAC but I can categorically state, as I said earlier that enough **** can be thrown containing right and wrong answers the candidate could pass whereas a short correct answer may not always contain all of the “words” on the markers sheet on that exam sitting to pass. Personally I feel, if an examiner can see clear evidence that the attempt to pass has been gained via the throw enough answers, correct and not correct then that paper should be marked down as it clearly demonstrates someone without the necessary understanding.
That approach would lead to the dreaded ‘hors-sujet’ which guarantees a poor mark.
Laziness or not thinking loses marks as well, eg a candidate telling me Jack Kerouac was an old man in 1947 because he had a military pension.
This candidate a) was supposed to have studied ‘On The Road’ in depth and b) was a native speaker.
I had heard the name Kerouac but knew nothing about him.
Just had a Google and he seems a complex character. Obviously I used Wikipedia which is probably not suitable for students as it is notoriously unreliable.
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Just seen that I can watch 'On the Road free on prime video.
I think I still have the book if I find it and you’re interested in reading it I’ll PM you for an address and I’ll send it to you.
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Thanks. That’s very kind.
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Fortunately one doesn’t sit an exam to gain a doctorate (instead your thesis is examined very thoroughly).
Apropos the earlier suggestion that literature and art may be exceptions because of subjectivity, I’ve no experience of the former, but I’ve examined over a thousand fine art students in the UK and elsewhere. Regardless of where or when, members of very mixed marking teams rarely disagreed about a grade, merely where in a grade band they’d place their initial mark.
In arts and humanities marking, the greatest difficulty is often how low to mark a very weak student, when 40 or 50% of the marking scale may be used for two or three grades of failure (weak, pathetic and bloody awful).
Marking in the humanities and social sciences will inevitably contain an element of subjectivity, but there is also a much larger element of concurrence.
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