Agrégation

In France, the agrégation (French pronunciation: ​[aɡʁeɡasjɔ̃]) is the most prestigious and selective civil service competitive examination for the public education system. The laureates are known as agrégés. A similar system exists in other countries.

Due to the difficulty and the selectivity of this competitive exam it often requires more than one year of preparation.

There are actually two different agrégations: an agrégation for secondary education, leading to the position of professeur agrégé, and an agrégation for professorships in some disciplines of higher education.

The main agrégation, the most famous one, leads the candidates to the position of professeur agrégé after secondary education. The difficulty and selectivity (number of available positions) vary from one discipline to another : there are about 300 such positions open each year in mathematics, but usually fewer positions for humanities and social sciences (only around 20 for philosophy, for instance), and perhaps only one seat in some rarely taught foreign languages such as Japanese. The professeurs agrégés constitute a higher category of teachers compared to the professeurs certifiés, recruited through the CAPES. In theory, the agrégés are expected to teach at high school level (lycées) and also at university, while the certifiés teach in junior high schools (collèges), but there is a significant overlap.

In addition to the vast majority of agrégés teaching in lycées, some agrégés teach in the preparatory classes to the grandes écoles. Finally, some agrégés teach in regular universities, but do not, nominally, do scientific research as regular university academics do; the positions are known as PRAG. Some similar but temporary positions (agrégé préparateur, AGPR), including research, exist in the écoles normales supérieures, but they are obviously very few and very hard to obtain.

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