Examinations: A Social Institution

Since it was founded in 1794, the École polytechnique has recruited its students through a competitive entrance examination. This article offers a detailed study of how this examination has been organized and has evolved up to the present days. Under the 1789 Revolution, examination centres and later on tours of examiners were set up. This examination long remained exclusively oral. It is only from the middle of the 19^th century onwards that written tests have been organized. These tests had a significant role for the eligibility to sit the oral part of the exam only after the Second World War.
More generally this competitive examination has gradually been transformed into a complex machinery which now carries out the grading and screening of candidates in a uniform and impersonal way. Whereas the oral exam was originally only related to mathematics, other skills and knowledge have gradually been taken into account both in oral and written tests. From the beginning of the 1990s the Ecole has been open to new candidates – young women, pupils from other training courses and foreigners–, which has tended to call into question the hegemony of mathematics and to a greater extent, the principles on which the entrance examination for the École polytechnique has been organized since its foundation.