The Parcoursup and My Master’s Ethical and Scientific Committee (CESPM) submitted its annual report this Monday, April 13, to Parliament (Senate and National Assembly) as well as to Philippe Baptiste, Minister of Higher Education, Research and Space. For 8 years, the objective of the CESPM has been to ensure the proper functioning of the two platforms and to provide areas for improvement.
Eight years after its creation, Parcoursup is no longer just the platform for high school students wishing to enroll in a degree. In 2025, one candidate in three was already a student in reorientation or an adult returning to studies.
33
%
of candidates via Parcoursup are not high school students: in reorientation or resuming studies
ministry of higher education
Also the apprenticeship offer has been multiplied by five, applications via My Master are reaching records… The Ethics Committee therefore has a lot to do and is calling for ever more improvement of the pathways via these two sites to guarantee more clarity and better access to training for all.
Here are the 22 avenues summarized for improving access to higher education via these two platforms.
Transparency: lifting the veil on algorithms
One of the Committee’s priorities for many years concerns platform “algorithms”: ranking of applications or training during search.
Even if the report recognizes “a clear improvement in the information given on Parcoursup: for each training course, candidates can know the detailed profiles of the candidates who received proposals the previous year”, it points out that the information is less complete for training courses. small capacity like the BTS, but also on My Master which does not yet have this wealth of data.
The Committee therefore demands ever greater clarity on the way in which search results appear to candidates via keyword search and recommends “Publishing the code – or, at a minimum, a specification – of the part of the Parcoursup and My Master platforms responsible for providing the ranking of results”.
To complete the criteria for analyzing applications available for each training sheet, the committee asks that each training be required to publish a report specifying the criteria for refusing applications the previous year (by penalizing training courses that do not provide this report). The report also points to a need for “minimum transparency” of the classification criteria and especially of refusal which is slow in coming and the CESPM recalls its impatience: “The Committee has been renewing recommendations on this subject for eight years. HAS”
Equity: fighting against territorial “double punishment”
The report highlights disparities in the geographical distribution of training, particularly in ÃŽle-de-France. “In 2025, a new baccalaureate from the Ile-de-France region is twice as likely to have no offer on Parcoursup as a new baccalaureate from outside ÃŽle-de-France. This gap has never been so big.” Also, the lack of short, professional training, in three years of the BUT type, often forces young people from families with modest incomes to leave their region.
This is thus the first recommendation of the CESPM which advocates massively developing BUT in ÃŽle-de-France to meet local demand. The Committee also proposes to better take into account the real geographical distance in the calculation of scholarships and access to student accommodation, while a flat-rate mobility aid of 500 euros is currently only proposed.
Apprenticeship: a sector to be regulated urgently
With 26% of apprenticeship places now offered, or 44% of training offered, this sector has become a pillar of Parcoursup, but it remains more complex and opaque despite the explosion in the number of work-study students. Five major recommendations come from the report:
The first concerns the enrichment of data for examining applications and pursuing career paths/opportunities. The Committee wants a systematic reporting of signed contracts to give candidates realistic indicators of success.
Also the report asks to make visible, in searches for apprenticeship training on Parcoursup, those which only organize it from the 2nd or 3rd year in addition to those which start from the first year.
As work-study studies require signing a contract with a company in addition to being accepted for training, the committee asks to “relax certain constraints weighing on apprenticeship recruitment in My Master”.
Faced with the risk of fraud, the report calls for strengthening educational controls on CFAs (Apprentice Training Centers) preparing for BTS.
Finally, the report also points out that many private training courses are not present in the two platforms and asks in particular to list “all master’s degrees open to learning under the same conditions of registration and visibility as other training courses”.
Simplifying the lives of candidates: towards “zero input”
To reduce errors and the stress of numerous applications, the report focuses on automation and interconnection of platforms.
In its third recommendation, the Committee asks to couple Parcoursup with education software to automatically pre-fill grades and ECTS credits… thus avoiding tedious manual entries “to pre-fill and make the data reliable (courses, grades, credits, graduation) “.
The Committee also calls for harmonization of the grading systems between the professional, techno and general baccalaureates. Inspired by the professional baccalaureate, the report suggests standardized continuous monitoring for all baccalaureates in order to guarantee comparable records. A very difficult recommendation to put in place and which falls outside the direct remit of the platform.
Focus on Masters: law and psychology under tension
The report is also concerned about the congestion of law and psychology courses on the My Master platform. These two courses are among the most requested master’s degrees each year.
Faced with numerous refusals, the number of appeals, also called “referrals”, has been multiplied by 2.5 since 2017. The “referral to the rector” procedure, judged to be on the verge of implosion, must be reformed so that the files are examined earlier, between late August and early September.
The Committee also proposes increasing the number of possible Master’s wishes from 15 to 20, but targeting them at the level of courses and not mentions to give candidates a greater chance of obtaining a wish.
Finally, a broader recommendation concerns the challenge of the coming years in moving Parcoursup from a simple post-baccalaureate guidance platform to a real “lifelong learning” tool, capable of managing fluid pathways between studies and employment. Will you one day have to keep your Parcoursup account open throughout your life in parallel with your retirement account or taxes?
