Agrégation

In France, the agrégation (French pronunciation: ​) is a competitive examination for civil service in the French public education system. Candidates for the examination, or agrégatifs, become agrégés once they are admitted to the position of professeur agrégé. In France, professeurs agrégés are distinguished from professeurs certifiés recruited through the CAPES training. The agrégés are usually expected to teach at high schools (lycées) and universities, while the certifiés usually teach in junior high schools (collèges), although there is a significant overlap.Non-tenure track: In France, the agrégation (French pronunciation: ​) is a competitive examination for civil service in the French public education system. Candidates for the examination, or agrégatifs, become agrégés once they are admitted to the position of professeur agrégé. In France, professeurs agrégés are distinguished from professeurs certifiés recruited through the CAPES training. The agrégés are usually expected to teach at high schools (lycées) and universities, while the certifiés usually teach in junior high schools (collèges), although there is a significant overlap. The examination may require more than a year of preparation. The difficulty and selectivity (quota) vary from one discipline to another: there are about 300 such positions open each year for mathematics alone, but usually fewer positions are made available for humanities and social sciences (for example, 61 positions for philosophy were offered in 2018) and perhaps only one seat in some rarely taught foreign languages such as Japanese. In addition to the vast majority of agrégés teaching in lycées, some agrégés teach in the preparatory classes to the grandes écoles or at the university level. Some agrégés teach in regular universities but do not, nominally, do scientific research as other university academics do; the positions are known as PRAG. Some positions (agrégé préparateur, AGPR), including research, exist in the écoles normales supérieures, but they are very few. The agrégation is typically open only to holders of a five-year university diploma (master's degree) or above. There is also an internal agrégation for professeurs certifiés, but it lacks the prestige of the external one although it remains selective (90 laureate/215 who passed the writing exams/873 who tried the writing exams/2001 candidates in 2010 in History-Geography). The following discusses the external one.