LAST Wednesday 62,000 Irish school students sat down to put their futures on the line in the Leaving Certificate. At 8 a.m. next Monday in France over 630,000 will be doing the same thing. They will be sitting the baccalaurat popularly known as the "bac" - the world's oldest and most famous school leaving exam. It was started under Napoleon in 1808. An international version is taken in schools around the world, including Lagan College in Belfast.
The exam, which up to 20 years ago was seen as the obsession of the French middle class, is now, at least for several weeks early in every summer, the obsession of the whole nation.
This became inevitable in the early 1980s when the then socialist education minister decreed that by the end of the century 80 per cent of 16 to 17 year old school leavers should take the exam. The figure then was just over 40 per cent it is now 67 per cent.
There are actually three bacs. Fifty seven per cent of students take the general bac, which is itself divided into three versions: literary (called L by students), scientific (S) and economic and social (FS). Twenty eight per cent take the technological bac and 15 per cent take the lowergrade professional bac.
The most sought after of all is S, in which good results are most likely to be the first step on the road to one of the prestigious "grandes ecoles", the institutes of higher studies which produce most of France's civil service elite and many of its top politicians and businessmen.
In a school like Lycee Louis Le Grand on Paris's Left Bank - whose glittering list of alumni runs from Moliere to the Marquis de Sade, from Robespierre to Chirac - 99 per cent of students pass the bac. Of these, seven take S, with its concentration on maths and physics, to every one who takes L, which emphasises philosophy and languages.
Here the real struggle is not to pass but to obtain the required very high mark to ensure entry to an exclusive two year preparatory course which can lead - via excruciatingly difficult exams - a "grande ecole" like the Ecole Normale Superieure or the Ecole Polytechnique. Once through these hallowed portals a career in the higher echelons of the "haute bourgeoisie" is virtually guaranteed.
BLACKROCK and Mount Anville students who have spent time at Louis Le Grand via the EU's "Socrates" exchange programme will have seen this forcing ground for the renewal of the French ruling class at first hand.
The subjects in the general bac are weighted according to their differing importance in the exam's three versions. Thus the traditional French discipline of philosophy could count for more than three times the marks for some lesser subjects in the L exam, while maths could do the same for students taking the S.
At the other end of the education spectrum are schools where a significant proportion of the students take the professional bac, introduced a decade ago to give a qualification in more practical subjects to academically weaker pupils.
In the Catholic lycee where Genevieve Chalochet teaches in Creteil, in the south eastern suburbs, 30 per cent take the professional bac. She is proud that the great majority of future secretaries and electricians she teaches will go quickly into jobs after their bac.
As recently as two or three years ago, many of them would have been ready for nothing except the dole queue.
The professional bac is unique in that successful candidates are forbidden to use it to go on to higher studies. "With the other two bacs you can't do anything, except go on to further study,", says Mrs Chalochet.
Up to the 1960s, when fewer than 100,000 took the bac, and near full employment was an assumed part of French life, passing this all important exam was the automatic passport to a job. That golden age is gone, but the pressures on the teenagers sitting down in exam halls next week to succeed have decreased hardly at all.
The bac is still seen as an almost mythical "rite of passage" into adulthood in France; a crucial gateway on the road towards' full national citizenship.
"The daughter of the Algerian woman who cleans for my father is sitting the exam this year, and the mother is in anguish," says, Alain Boulibreau, a languages' teacher at Louis Le Grand.
Its importance is reflected in the massive marking machine which swings into action immediately the three days of intensive exams are over. This, produces nationwide results - taking in students from the French West Indies to the south Pacific - by the second week of July, long before Ireland's equivalent results are ready.
The teaching profession in France - often criticised for being too left-wing in ideology and too conservative in temperament - is determined to oppose embryonic government plans to water down the once off nature of the bac by introducing elements of continuous assessment. Many teachers feel this will open both the exam, and the secondary education system in general, to pressure from powerful lobbies.
"Our job as teachers is to form the students fully as individuals, to bring them to the intellectual level where they can succeed in a national exam taken by all students, regardless of region, class or background," says Alain Boulibreau. "The demands of the market, for example, for a certain kind of education should not concern us."