The Concours général is France's national academic competition for lycée students, and it has a feature many families discover too late: students cannot sign up for it. Their maths teacher proposes them, and the school enters them. A very strong but quiet student, or one who joined the school recently, can miss it through a simple oversight.
It is also the hardest maths paper a student in the French system can sit. Five hours, a few long problems, a script judged on the writing as much as on the results. Preparing for it seriously takes a student well beyond the competition. The prize, however, does not always play the role families expect on an application, for a reason of timing I explain below.
What is the Concours général in maths?
The Concours général des lycées rewards, every year, the best students of the last two years of lycée (première and terminale, roughly ages 16 to 18) in about thirty subjects. In maths, it is open to final-year students on the general track who take the maths specialism. The paper lasts five hours and takes place in March.
The 2025 paper gives a good sense of its spirit: three independent problems, the first of which defines an "addition" between points on a parabola, then asks the student to prove its properties and study a sequence of points built from it. Nothing in it goes beyond the final-year syllabus. But the student has to handle an object they have never seen, chain proofs over several pages and hold on for five hours. The paper's own instructions say that clarity and precision of writing count in the marking.
Entering the Concours général: it goes through the teacher
Under the ministerial order of 27 August 2025, teachers of the subjects open to the competition propose candidates to the school's leadership. Each school may enter at most 10% of the students taking the subject, with a minimum of two. In a lycée with 150 final-year students in the maths specialism, that means fifteen places.
French lycées abroad that are accredited by the French Ministry of Education for the last two years (homologués) take part too. For an expat family, it is a chance to measure a child against the best students in France without leaving their school.
For parents, the calendar therefore starts earlier than they think: if your child has the level and the appetite, their teacher needs to know before entries close, in late autumn. A student who has already shown a taste for hard problems, for instance in the Olympiades de première (the national maths olympiad for students aged 16 to 17), gets noticed far more easily than one who simply has excellent grades.
Example: the 2026 session. Schools entered their candidates on the Cyclades platform from 26 November to 15 December 2025. The papers took place between 16 and 27 March 2026, all starting at noon Paris time. Each session's calendar is published in the ministry's official bulletin in the autumn.
Since 2026 there is also a Concours général du collège, open to students in troisième (the last year of middle school, age 14 to 15). One of its five subjects covers maths and science through problem solving, in a single two-and-a-half-hour written paper. Winners are recognised region by region. It is a good first step for a middle-school student who already does olympiads.
How to prepare for the Concours général in maths
Past papers and examiners' reports are published on éduscol, the ministry's resource site for teachers. They are the only material I need to prepare a student, and I use them this way:
- Start in première. A student in the penultimate year can already tackle part of the past problems, especially in number theory and geometry. Waiting for the final year leaves barely six months, in the middle of the baccalauréat year, which is too short.
- Work problem by problem, then in real time. First one full problem a week, with no time limit. Then at least two complete papers in five hours, to learn to manage fatigue and to choose what to leave aside.
- Read the examiners' reports. They show what cost good candidates their marks: a forgotten hypothesis, a badly set-up induction, a special case presented as a proof.
- Have every script read. On a five-hour paper, half the progress comes from the review, from seeing where the reasoning skipped a step.
The Olympiades de première are the best training beforehand: the same taste for open-ended problems, in a shorter format. I describe that progression in Preparing for the French maths olympiads, and past olympiad problems are sorted by difficulty in Fields, our free tool.
What a Concours général prize changes
In each subject, the jury may award three prizes, five accessits (honourable distinctions ranked below the prizes) and at most ten mentions. In maths, that means no more than eighteen award winners for the whole of France and the French lycées around the world. Every year, across all subjects, around 150 students and apprentices are rewarded. A prize, an accessit or even a mention puts a student at the very top of their year group, and prépa teachers and engineering schools know how to read it.
There is, however, a timing gap families rarely see coming. The maths paper takes place in March of the final year, and the results come out at the end of the school year. By then, Parcoursup choices (France's national higher-education application platform) have long been confirmed, and applications to the UK or the US have been decided. The prize arrives after the application.
What goes on the application is the selection. Having been entered for the Concours général by one's school can be mentioned in the activities section of Parcoursup, which usually stays open until early April, after the papers, and can be told in an application abroad, provided one sentence explains what the competition is. The prize itself will serve later: an application after a gap year, a school interview, a master's file. I explain how to present this kind of distinction in Maths olympiads on a university application.
What I do with a student aiming for the Concours général
I never prepare a student for the Concours général alone. I prepare them to search for a long time and write precisely, which helps on the day, then in prépa, then in any maths admissions test, from Cambridge's TMUA to the engineering schools' exams. The competition becomes one step in a path that often starts at age 13 with the olympiads.
In private lessons, that means choosing past papers at the right moment, reading every script, and talking the calendar through with the family, including when to let the teacher know the student wants to be entered. And for families preparing a selective application, in France or abroad, Carmine ties this work to the file, so that each distinction lands in the right place at the right time.