Concours CPGE

Overview

The Concours CPGE are the competitive entrance exams taken at the end of the Classes Préparatoires aux Grandes Écoles (CPGE), France's two-year post-Baccalauréat preparatory track. CPGE itself is not the exam: it is the intensive two-year programme, run inside selected lycées, that prepares students for these entrance competitions. Success in a concours is what gives access to a "grande école" — an elite engineering school, business school, École Normale Supérieure (ENS), or other specialised institution — rather than a regular university.

There is no single, unified "CPGE exam." Instead, each family of grandes écoles runs its own concours, built around one or more shared "banques d'épreuves" (exam banks) that several schools recruit through at once. Which concours a student sits depends on their CPGE track: scientific (for engineering schools, Polytechnique and the ENS), economic and commercial (for business schools), or literary (for the ENS, the École des Chartes, and some business schools' literary-track entry).

Who can apply

Candidates for the Concours CPGE are students enrolled in, or who have completed, a CPGE programme matching the concours' track:

• Scientific tracks (for example MPSI/MP, MP2I/MPI, PCSI/PC, PTSI/PT, BCPST) feed the engineering-school and ENS scientific concours.

• Economic and commercial tracks (ECG, ECT) feed the business-school concours (BCE, Ecricome) and some ENS economics programmes.

• Literary tracks (A/L, B/L) feed the ENS literary concours, the École des Chartes concours, and a dedicated "Lettres et Humanités" option that some business schools open to literary students.

Most candidates sit in their second CPGE year, after two years of preparation following the Baccalauréat. Admission into CPGE itself is a separate, earlier step, decided by the lycée through Parcoursup on the student's school file.

Exam pattern

Each concours combines written exams ("écrit"), which most candidates sit, with oral exams ("oral") reserved for candidates who clear a written cut-off ("admissibilité"). The exact subjects and coefficients vary by track and by the specific bank, but the general structure is shared:

A single candidate can sit several concours banks in the same year within their track (for example, a scientific-track student commonly registers for more than one engineering bank through SCEI), each giving access to a different set of schools.

Marking and results

The Concours CPGE are not pass/fail exams. Each concours produces a single numerical score per candidate, combining their written and (where applicable) oral marks with each paper's coefficient. Candidates are then ranked against every other candidate in that same concours, from first to last.

This rank, not a fixed passing mark, decides which schools a candidate can be offered a seat at: each participating school sets how many places it has, and offers go out in rank order to candidates who listed that school among their preferences (see "After the exam" below). A high overall score with a weak rank in a very competitive concours can still mean missing out on a given school, while the same score could secure a different school in a less competitive concours.

Important dates

Dates shift slightly each year and differ by concours; the table below gives the 2026-session pattern reported for several major banks as an illustration, not a guarantee for every bank.

In general, written exams across the scientific and business banks are concentrated in April and early May, with oral exams following from late May through July, once written results are published. Literary-track concours (ENS, Chartes) typically follow a similar spring-written, early-summer-oral shape, scheduled by each institution. Registration for the engineering concours through SCEI opens well before the exams, typically from early December to mid-January for the following spring's session.

How to apply

For scientific-track (engineering) concours, registration is centralised through SCEI (Service des Concours Écoles d'Ingénieurs): candidates register once on the SCEI portal, choose which concours banks to sit, and receive a single registration number used for convocations, results, and the schools-preference process. After the written and oral exams, candidates submit one ranked list of every school they would accept, across all the concours they sat, between March and late July.

Business-school candidates register separately through the BCE and/or Ecricome groups' own platforms, depending on which member schools they are targeting; a student can register for both groups if their chosen schools are split across them. Literary-track candidates register directly with the ENS or École des Chartes concours they are sitting.

In every case, registration happens while the candidate is still in CPGE, and the lycée confirms the candidate's enrolment and track as part of the registration file.

After the exam

Admission is decided by matching each candidate's rank in each concours against the ranked list of schools they submitted, within the number of seats each school has made available. For the engineering concours run through SCEI, this runs as a sequence of rounds: at each round, a candidate who does not yet hold a confirmed offer can receive one proposal — the best school on their list that their rank still allows, given how many seats remain — and must accept, decline, or stay on a waiting list before the next round. Business-school groups (BCE, Ecricome) run a comparable rank-and-preference admission process among their own member schools.

A candidate can hold admission offers from more than one track at once (for example, a scientific-track student's engineering-concours offer alongside a business-school offer, if they sat both), and chooses a single school to confirm. Candidates who do not secure a seat at a school they are willing to join can choose to repeat a CPGE year and sit the concours again the following session, subject to the lycée's own policy on repeating.

Preparation tips

• Treat the written exams as the main hurdle: in most concours, the written score decides who is even invited to the oral stage, so consistent performance across every written paper matters more than excelling in just one subject.

• Practise under real exam timing and conditions throughout the second CPGE year, since the written papers are long (often several hours each) and spread across a tightly packed week.

• Build oral-exam practice (clear spoken explanation, handling follow-up questions from a jury) well before the oral period, since written and oral skills are assessed quite differently.

• Research each concours bank's own list of member schools and coefficients for the subjects that matter most to the student's preferred schools, since weighting differs across banks even within the same track.

• Plan the preference list (vœux) carefully before the results come in: because offers follow strict rank order against that list, an unrealistic or poorly ordered list can cost a seat the candidate's rank would otherwise have secured.

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