From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Mon May 07 2007 - 12:51:29 CDT
> > Unlike in USA, crayons are not accepted here, except for arts and
> > technical drawings.
>
> Are you talking about pencils or wax crayons?
Do you use a wax crayon (commonly named "pastel" in French elementary
schools where there are used) to create a technical drawing (for courses
like maths, technology, architecture)?
Wax cryaons may be used to fill and annotate a geographic map, or in arts
courses but this is not for writing text, only for graphics.
For official exams, unerasable ink must be used for text written by
candidates, and there are requirements about the color of ink (dark blue or
dark violet or black), so that the exam corrector can add his visible
annotations, traditionally using red ink.
Another difference: most French exams (at every scholar level) require
writing lot of text. FAQs with checkboxes are really rare, and candidates
must explain their results... except if they are pure memorization controls,
or responses for which there's only one correct way to get the correct
result (most often an unexplained correct result or a correct result given
with a false reason is often considered wrong).
No, graphite pencils are almost never used in France in schools and
universities after the primary ages, and in fact few people like to have to
cut again the pencil heads each time it breaks; rollerball pens or more
modern pens that writes well in every orientation and without extra effort
on all kinds of papers are used.
Fountain pens are now prohibited in most places, even though the French
"plume" with removable reservoirs is used quite often and still mandated in
many classes (because the ink can be corrected once using an easy to use
erasor pen, then an normal un-erasable pen for rewriting)
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