Baccalaureate: can good handwriting earn points?

Louise Sallé, edited by Nathanaël Bentura 06:55, May 11, 2022

The baccalaureate begins this Wednesday with the specialty tests.

More than 520,000 candidates must pass two subjects with a high coefficient (each counting for 16% of the final mark).

These new tests, introduced during the 2019 baccalaureate reform, are taking place for the first time.

They had never seen the light of day due to the health crisis. 

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As with every exam, students must pay attention to the quality of their writing, so as not to interfere with the correction.

Since the copies are now digitized - they are scanned at the end of the proofs - the illegibility of some is even more problematic, since the content of the image may lack sharpness.

This can therefore penalize some students, whose sloppy handwriting is lacking. 

More and more high school students consult graphotherapists 

It may be the fault of computer or smartphone keyboards, used instead of pens in daily life, or the lack of hours dedicated to calligraphy in the small classes, which gives the feeling of copies less and less well written in terms of form.

In any case, more and more high school students are consulting graphotherapists, like Audrey Bietolini, who works in the Tarn. 

"As the exam period approaches, I have more requests from high school students who are alerted by teachers about their readability," she says.

"Some teachers take points away from them to encourage them to improve before the baccalaureate."

"The care, the control of the gesture, come after the form, which can prove to be penalizing", continues Audrey Bietolini.

"Some students have retained bad habits adopted in the early grades, with letters formed upside down or dented, for example."

Scanning copies makes proofreaders more tired 

In the baccalaureate, teachers do not have the right to refuse to evaluate a poorly written paper.

But this can cause a loss of points, insists Aude Denizot, former high school teacher and author of the book

.

"The corrector is a human being, not a machine," she says.

“And even though he tries to be unbiased, when the copy is badly written, he gets tired, he gets pissed off, and so he can, even without realizing it, be harsher than he would have been. if the copy had been well written", affirms this professor of law at the University of Le Mans.

Digitization makes correcting baccalaureate exams even more difficult, some teachers admit.

Marc Charbonnier teaches history-geography in the Hauts-de-Seine, in the Paris region, and this year corrects copies of specialty tests: "There is additional fatigue, caused by the overuse of screens to read copies,” he says.

"The rendering may lack sharpness", adds Yveline Prouvost, teacher in a high school in Roubaix. 

For letters that are clearly visible on the scanner, light colors are not recommended, for example.

Pens with black or dark blue ink are therefore preferred.