KEY POINTS:
PARIS - Is your pen ready? Lots of paper to hand? Good.
Here are your questions. Choose one. You have four hours in which to answer.
* Can art transform our consciousness of the real?
* Is it easier to know other people than to know oneself?
* Can one desire without suffering?
* Can perception train itself?
If just reading these questions leaves you perplexed, pity the half a million young French people who last week faced the brain-teasers for real in the philosophy exam for their end-of-school diploma, the baccalaureat.
"Le Bac", as it is commonly called, is anchored into French life as solidly as the Marseillaise, the tricolore, the baguette, Roquefort cheese and bolshy train drivers.
The slender scroll is more important than a school leaving certificate, for it provides the legal right to a place in university. Without the Bac, tossed into an economy poor at nurturing entrepreneurial skills, a teenager may face a working life asking customers if they want their frites super-sized.
So it's no wonder a big chunk of the country goes into a lockdown mode when the week-long Bac season comes around in June.
The students train for this moment for three solid years, and in the final weeks they throw themselves into frenzied revision, like thoroughbred horses pacing over a training track as they gear for the Grand National.
Sales of revision books, test papers and tipsheets soar during this period, as do pharmacists' sales of nerve-soothing drugs and sleeping pills. Parents are expected to burn the midnight oil too and kid brothers and sisters are under ferocious instructions to go around the house on tiptoe.
The collective neurosis comes to a peak in Bac week itself. Everything in France's administration is super-centralised.
There is only one examining board and to prevent any cheating, the papers are kept under close guard. Exams take place at the same time, regardless of whether the location is metropolitan France or the French overseas departments and territories.
For instance, a student in Paris will take the maths exam in the morning, at precisely the same time as his counterpart in Saint Pierre et Miquelon, off the eastern coast of Canada, where it is the dark hours before dawn, and in Tahiti, where it is late at night on the previous day.
The system was the brainchild of Napoleon, who introduced the test exactly 200 years ago in order to establish an unbiased educational standard.
For decades, the diploma "was the preserve of a small elite drawn from the bourgeoisie" who were tested in a Greek or Roman author, says historian Jacques-Olivier Boudon, in a paper published this month in the magazine Historia.
Today, the Bac has broadened to eight or nine subjects. It now comprises three branches, comprising a general diploma, a technological diploma and a "professional" diploma offering specialties in trades. Everyone has the same core of subjects, though, and the goal is to get at least 10 points out of 20 in order to secure a pass.
The weighting of each subject differs according to the type of Bac you do. For instance, students specialising in literature have a big chunk of their marks allotted to their performance in French, and few for their performance in maths, physics and chemistry.
But one thing remains unchanged since Napoleon's day: if you fail your Bac, you are doomed to redo your final year in school before being allowed another bash.
Outside France, the Bac is widely praised as requiring all students to acquire a certain standard of knowledge in a wide range of subjects, rather than specialising too early.
Within France, though, the system is being accused of bowing to lax standards and under fire for its all-or-nothing exam week. In 2007, 628,526 people took the Bac, and 524,313 passed, amounting to a success rate of 83.4 per cent, compared with 67.2 per cent in 1970.
A former president of the Sorbonne, Jean-Robert Pitte, raised a storm this year by writing a book, Stop a l'Arnaque du Bac (Stop the Bac Scam), in which he blasted evaluators for grade inflation. Senate members Jacques Valade and Jacques Legendre have launched a powerful campaign to slash the number of subjects in the Bac and to scale exams over two years.
But any change is likely to be glacial.
FRENCH LESSONS
* The baccalaureat is the academic qualification French students sit at the end of their high school education. Without it they cannot study at university.
* It was introduced 200 years ago by Napoleon to establish an unbiased educational standard. Before the French Revolution only the privileged went to schools, which were run by the Catholic Church.
* Exams in all French territories are sat at the same time as in France. That means when students in France are sitting an exam in the morning, students in Saint Pierre et Miquelon, off the eastern coast of Canada, are doing the same exam before dawn, while in Tahiti students are sitting the exam late at night.
