Concours EMPT common mistakes
Concours EMPT · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Reciting articles of the Constitution or of the Code général de la fonction publique from memory without linking them to the case facts, so the answer names a rule but never applies it to the situation described.
Candidates prepare public law by memorising article numbers and institutional organigrams because that feels like the measurable part; the exam, however, tests qualification of facts, and pure recitation gives no points on the application criterion.
What to do instead
For every rule you learn, force yourself to write one sentence of the form 'in the present case, X satisfies/does not satisfy condition Y because Z'. Build a one-page table per topic with columns: rule, source, conditions of application, typical factual trigger. In practice papers, always finish each paragraph with an explicit application sentence.
Treating the hierarchy of norms as a slogan and failing to spot the concrete conflict: applying a regulation that contradicts a statute, or a circular that adds a condition not provided by the decree it comments on.
The hierarchy is learned as a diagram in first-year courses and never re-worked on real texts; candidates also confuse circulaires impératives and circulaires interprétatives, a classic trap in administrative-law fact patterns.
What to do instead
Drill on short extracts: give yourself a statute article, a decree article and a circular paragraph on the same subject, and identify in writing which norm prevails and why, citing the competent judge and the remedy. Keep a running list of the leading distinctions (loi/règlement, circulaire interprétative/impérative, directive non transposée) with one example each.
Confusing the civil and criminal liability tracks and the procedural regimes: answering a tort question with penal vocabulary, or mixing responsabilité pour faute, responsabilité sans faute and the regimes of loi Badinter without naming the applicable text.
Private-law courses are often revised by theme rather than by mechanism, so the student knows the words 'faute', 'dommage', 'lien de causalité' but not which court, which limitation period, and which text govern each regime.
What to do instead
Rebuild each regime as a decision tree: facts -> qualification (contractual/tortious, faute/sans faute) -> competent court -> text -> limitation period -> remedy. Practise by writing the 'qualification' paragraph first, before any development, and check it against the tree. Include the loi du 5 juillet 1985 and the loi du 19 mai 1998 in the tree with their specific conditions.
In a cas pratique in civil procedure, jumping straight to the merits and forgetting to check the preliminary procedural questions: jurisdiction (compétence d'attribution and territoriale), admissibility, time limits, and the correct writ.
Candidates read the facts as a substantive-law story and answer the question 'who is right?' when the question asked is 'before which court, in what form, and until when?'. Procedural time limits are also revised late and forgotten under stress.
What to do instead
Adopt a fixed four-step grid for every procedural cas pratique: 1) competent court and its basis, 2) applicable time limit with its starting point, 3) required act and its formal content, 4) possible incidents (exception, appeal). Write the grid at the top of your answer sheet before drafting, and train on fact patterns where the procedural answer is the whole answer.
Confusing the roles of the ordonnateur and the comptable public, and describing the contrôle des dépenses engagées or the comptabilité de fait as if they were still current, producing an answer that mixes the pre- and post-GBCP (gestion budgétaire et comptable publique) framework.
Many manuals and older course notes predate the décret du 7 novembre 2012 and the suppression of the contrôle des dépenses engagées; candidates reproduce inherited wording without dating it, and the separation of ordonnateur/comptable is learned as a formula rather than as a set of concrete acts.
What to do instead
Write a one-page 'who does what' sheet: engagement, liquidation, ordonnancement on one side; contrôle, paiement, comptabilisation on the other; then list the responsibilities and the personal liability of each. Date every rule you cite and discard anything presented as current that predates 2012 unless it is historical context explicitly labelled as such.
Describing the budget cycle in the abstract without being able to state, for a given document, whether a credit is limitative or évaluatif, whether it is engagé, consommé or disponible, and what the result is on the compte de résultat versus the balance sheet.
Public finance is revised as a narrative of the LOLF stages; candidates never manipulate actual figures, so they cannot read a table of credits or a balance sheet and answer a numerical question.
What to do instead
Work on real anonymised budget documents: for each line, state the nature of the credit, compute the available balance, and say which accounting statement is affected. Do at least ten short numerical exercises (reports, balances, restes à réaliser) and write the reasoning, not just the figure.
Answering economics questions with definitions only, without a mechanism: defining inflation, chômage or the multiplier but never explaining the causal chain, the assumptions, or the empirical order of magnitude.
Economics is often revised as a glossary because the exam is written and definitions are easy to memorise; but the marking grid rewards reasoning, and candidates have no stock of figures or mechanisms to mobilise.
What to do instead
For each core concept, prepare a three-line mechanism card: assumptions -> transmission channel -> expected effect and its order of magnitude. Memorise a small set of dated figures (growth, public debt ratio, unemployment rate, ECB rate) with their source and year, and practise inserting them as evidence rather than as decoration.
Treating 'questions internationales et affaires européennes' as general knowledge and giving a commentary without identifying the competent institution, the legal basis, and the decision-making procedure for the specific issue raised.
Candidates follow the news and can talk about a summit or a treaty, but they have not internalised the ordinary legislative procedure, the role of the Conseil européen versus the Council, or the distinction between an EU regulation and a directive in a concrete case.
What to do instead
For each major policy file (migration, budget, enlargement, defence), write a one-page institutional map: legal basis in the treaties, actors, procedure, voting rule, and the national level of implementation. Practise answering 'who decides, on what basis, by what majority' for ten current files, and check each answer against the treaty article.
In the note de synthèse, paraphrasing the documents in the order they appear rather than constructing a problem-driven plan, and inserting personal knowledge or opinions that are not in the dossier.
Under time pressure, reading and summarising feel like the task, and a document-by-document order is the path of least resistance; candidates also fear that a purely documentary note will look thin, so they add outside material that the grid penalises.
What to do instead
Before drafting, spend fifteen minutes producing a table: document, idea, and which part of the question it answers; derive two or three parts from that table, never from the document order. Draft an introduction that states the question and announces the plan, and enforce a rule: every paragraph must be traceable to a document, with the source indicated. Remove any sentence you cannot source.
In the language paper, translating word for word and reusing French sentence structure, producing grammatically correct but idiomatically wrong prose, and mis-handling the fixed register of institutional vocabulary (e.g. 'public accounts', 'civil service', 'local authority').
Candidates revise vocabulary lists in isolation and never practise full sentences under time constraints; the institutional lexicon of the exam is precisely where literal translation fails, and it is also what the exam most often tests.
What to do instead
Build a bilingual glossary of institutional terms from the exam's own domains and learn each term inside a full sentence. Practise timed translation of 150-word passages from a French administrative or economic text, then compare with a model and log every calque. Re-read your version for verb tense and article use, which are the two most frequent losses.