Professeur agrégé

Note: the following content needs to be reviewed based on reliable (and historic) sources. Please refer to: Société des Agrégés de l'Université, 25 rue Descartes, 750O5 Paris and their website below for more accurate information.

http://www.societedesagreges.net/association/?Le_concours_de_l%27agrégation:Histoire_du_concours The "Agrégation" was initially created in France in the 18th century (1766) with the purpose to provide excellence in education (at all levels). A previous version of the article below referred to "Two agrégations" and to the fact that there are "equivalents in other countries", which requires verification based on factual information.

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, and the candidates as agrégatifs.

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

The agrégation leads the candidates to the position of professeur agrégé. 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.

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