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Exams, resits and the grading system
French universities organize most assessment at the end of each semester, in exam sessions called partiels, though many programs now also use continuous assessment. Grades are out of twenty, and a course unit is usually passed with an average of ten. Within a unit, and often across units in the same semester, good grades can compensate for weaker ones, according to the weighting, the coefficient, of each course. Some programs set minimum grades below which a course must be retaken whatever the overall average, so students are advised to read their own program's rules, which vary from one university and degree to another. Students who do not pass a unit usually get a second chance in a resit session, the session de rattrapage, often held in late spring or early summer. For master's students, it can coincide with the end of the thesis, which is why the standard advice is to treat the first session as the only one. The vocabulary of exam season is shared across French education: bachoter, from the baccalauréat, means to cram; les annales, collections of past exam papers, are a staple of revision for the bac, for university exams and for competitive exams; and faire l'impasse, deliberately skipping part of the syllabus and hoping it does not come up, is a strategy every French student has heard of and few teachers recommend.