Parcoursup


Parcoursup is an application process designed by both the French Ministry of Education and the French Ministry of Higher Education, Research and Innovation to allocate undergraduate places to high school students and other candidates, mainly undergraduate students wanting a reorientation. It was released in 2018 and replaced the former APB. In 2018, 666,000 high school students registered to Parcoursup in order to apply to an undergraduate program. The following year, the site received applications from approximately 651,000 high school students
The main objective of the platform was to achieve “meritocracy” as Emmanuel Macron and his government made it a priority. Parcoursup thus replaced the previous system of random drawing between students to implement an examination of each student file.
However, Parcoursup has suffered a lot of criticism. It is currently being blamed for creating anxiety among students, and being opaque because each university uses its own algorithm to decide which students will be admitted. It has also be blamed for the amount of work it generates within universities. Indeed, Parcoursup allows students to make from 1 to 10 wishes with as many as 20 subwishes for each of them. Hence, undergraduate programs receive far more candidatures than they used to and some universities can have to consider more than 100,000 student files. This has led to strikes within French universities and contributed to a controversy between left- and right-wing parties.