Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-05-19
Source: The Conversation – France (in French)– By Laurence Gatti, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Law and Social Sciences, Member of the Jean Carbonnier Institute (UR 13396), University of Poitiers Requested by certain programs, the cover letter holds an uncertain place in Parcoursup.
Neither defined by law nor truly regulated, it nonetheless plays a role in the evaluation of applications. What then is its value and can it really justify a difference in treatment between candidates? A few reflections before the first decisions of the admission phase.
The cover letter occupies a curious place in Parcoursup. It is often requested, sometimes considered important, but the Education Code does not define it.article L.
612-3organizes the examination of undergraduate applications and requires, when the number of applications exceeds the admission capacity, considering the coherence between the training project, the candidate’s knowledge and skills, and the characteristics of the training.
The letter therefore does not appear as an autonomous criterion. It is rather a means of assessing this coherence. Let’s take a few examples.
For thelaw degree from the University of Poitiers, the criteria announced to candidates are clear: the application review committee pays attention to the choice of specialties, the Avenir form, and the cover letter, and candidates are advised to demonstrate the alignment of their training project with the requested program.
At the University of Bordeaux, it is stated that the personalized cover letter is an important element because it mustto highlight a strong determination to study law. At the University Paris Cité, it is specified that ” thestandardized and silent cover letterson the candidates’ project must be banned.
In these three cases, the logic is the same: the letter is not designed as a literary exercise but as an element whose function, among others, is to objectify the alignment of the project with the training.
Between personalization and anonymity The official instructions from Parcoursup confirm this orientation.
The “student sheet” dedicated towriting the cover letterindicates that the candidate must explain what motivates them for the program, rely on its characteristics, its expectations, the criteria used to review applications, as well as on their own skills and achievements.
It adds that the content must be adapted to each program, avoid copy-pasting, show the steps taken to better understand the program, and never mention their identity in the letter. In other words, the letter is supposed to be both personalized, targeted towards a specific training, and compatible with the anonymization requirements of the file.
From there, it is possible to identify minimum requirements. The letter must be intelligible, personal, oriented towards the requested training, sufficiently concrete to reveal a link between the background, skills, steps taken, and the expressed project.
Finally, it must be anonymous. These requirements are not all of the same nature. Anonymity falls under a regulatory text,article D. 612-1-13 of the Education Code, and more generally guarantees equal treatment. Personalization, adaptation to the training, and coherence of the content in turn fall under standards of assessment, which can be made objective once the criteria have been published.
Conversely, the defective letter is simply not a letter. It may be empty content, clearly off-topic, reduced to a few signs, or contrary to anonymity rules. We still encounter in the files texts that are more like jokes than genuine applications.
However, a conventional or clumsy letter cannot be considered nonexistent. It can be weak without being legally null. This nuance is essential. The administrative judge, for his part, will not control the intrinsic quality of a motivation letter.
He will not substitute his judgment for that of the admissions committee. However, he can check the transparency of the criteria and their implementation. The letter can then serve to establish that an application was not distinguished, without the judge becoming a style or spelling corrector.
Between individualization and large-scale processing There remains a paradox, noted by the Ethics and Scientific Committee of Parcoursup in itsthird annual report to Parliament, published in February 2021: “In Parcoursup, motivation letters have a reputation for being barely read, and moreover, the fact that there is a motivation letter for each application encourages seeing it as a formal exercise, where one simply places the keywords that are assumed to be expected by the selection committees.” This observation does not suffice to completely undermine the value of the letter, but invites questioning its use.
If the letter is requested, transmitted, and taken into account in the review of the file, it must still be truly useful to the decision. If it is merely a formal ritual, its capacity to justify a difference in treatment becomes more difficult to defend.
The difficulty is all the greater if one considers that the expression of aspirations in the projects depends heavily on the methods of school support and family capital. The letters, even when presented as the result of personal expression, remain partly structured by the conditions under which the candidates could be helped, reviewed, or, on the contrary, left alone facing the exercise.
This is not about substituting sociological critique for legal analysis but rather suggesting that such a loosely regulated criterion must be handled with caution, especially since it may reward less the motivation itself than the mastery of expressive codes.
Thus understood, the motivation letter in Parcoursup is neither a mere ornament nor an independent selection tool. It is a component of the file with derived value, whose legitimacy depends on three conditions: being requested, fitting within published criteria, and effectively contributing to the assessment of the project.
Between its weak textual anchoring, the administrative instructions that shape it, and the practice noted by the Ethics Committee, it mainly reveals a central tension in Parcoursup: to individualize the examination of applications while organizing this processing on a large scale.
Laurence Gatti does not work for, advise, own shares in, receive funds from any organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no other affiliation than her research institution. –ref.
Cover letters: what value on Parcoursup?https://theconversation.com/cover-letters-what-value-on-parcoursup-280630