As the Erasmus scheme marks its 30th birthday, many students are preparing for a semester at a French university. Questions about paperwork, housing, social life? Bella Roberts, who studied at La Sorbonne, warned students to be prepared to be patient when it comes to administration. The first thing to note before you unpack your bags is that French universities are heavily oversubscribed.
So lecture halls are jammed and administration is slow. This really is a case of survival of the fittest. Selection is made as you progress through your studies โ not everyone is expected to graduate, in fact the university relies on drop-outs. This means a lot of work and fairly brutal treatment of those who fall by the waysideโฆ An assembly at the Bordeaux University. They can go on for hours. Roberts gave The Local an insight into her time at La Sorbonne.
You might be unaccustomed to this lunch-break culture, but factor it in: embrace it and have a nice lunch yourself. In Toulouse, another of the students we spoke to noticed the need to be organized when it comes to timetabling and course clashes.
French students spend at least 20 hours a week in lectures and seminars. Seminars that last until 7 or 8pm are not unheard of. You will need to work on your attention span, because classes in France tend to be two to three hours long. Again, exams are normally longer than you may be accustomed to back home. They normally consist of at least three hours for one big essay question or three to four short ones. There are even some which go on for four to five hours.
The marking scheme goes from one to twenty, ten being the pass-mark. Between nine and 12 is considered average. While in many universities world-wide, students tend to study far from home and stay at the university for weekends, in France, students generally live locally.
