I was about to submit some objection but it turns out you've posted quite interesting links so I'm going to ponder that for a while. If I don't edit this post consider that you've successfully convinced me and changed my mind. Thanks for the pointers!
That's just an attempt to salvage meritocracy. The problem is that there is no single metric one could rigorously construct that encapsulates everything one needs for success, partly because 'success' isn't well-defined (there's no such thing as 'winning', remember?) and partly because even if such a metric were constructed it would rapidly become obsolete as one's personality and genreal society evolve.
In more technical terms, some spaces just aren't metrizable ;)
I never implied that, in fact I'm pretty noncommittal on the matter and would do away with the baccalaureat (or maturite, or whatever) entirely.
60 years ago a test was hard and most people failed it. Today it's easy and most people pass it. What's the difference? Why even have a test? Since we're somehow talking about French-speaking countries, Belgium doesn't have such a test and isn't worse off for it.
The problem is that we're being sold the 'meritocracy' narrative in the academical and technical circles. You often see it in HN discussions about hiring decisions (reasoning involving the "top 1% programmers" without any indication as to what that means exactly). If you have the introverted, dilligent, keeping-your-head-down, got-high-marks-at-school mentality that I assume is prevalent on HN, it can come as a shock that despite following all the 'rules' you don't get to 'win at life'. Learning that there's no such thing as 'rules' (or at least, none of the rules worth following are public or written down or even fixed) or 'winning' isn't something that can be taught in class. 'Meritocracy' is the illusion that life, prestige and status attainment somehow work like getting high grades at school and we'd do ourselves a collective service by getting rid of the notion and viewing life and its opportunities in a more pragmatic way.
On the other hand most people in the 50/60s would also fail the brevet (or baccalaureat for that matter). I can't speak for the math level but I do know that school in the 60s required you to learn every single prefecture and chef-lieu by heart in geography classes, and the name of every single bone and organ in biology classes. Sometimes modern reforms aren't all that bad.
Abilities are not normally distributed but power law distributed (a tiny elite of skilled people and a fat tail that represents the unskilled mass). This is one of the shortcomings of IQ (which is coerced into a normal distribution) and its purported ability to 'predict' real-life abilities.
His courses are so amazing that I got interested in Greek after listening to a couple of his lessons and listened to the entire course when I had no prior interest before. It's that good.