The CESS is the secondary-leaving certificate for Belgium's French Community (Wallonia and French-speaking Brussels), and its defining structural feature — a genuine outlier among comparable European systems — is that most of a student's outcome rests on their own school's conseil de classe (class council) judgment of the whole-year record, rather than one nationally standardized exam score. Since the early 2020s, Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles has introduced a partial centralization through externally set, centrally graded exams specifically in French and History, with the passing threshold for these two components raised to 60% each starting with the June 2027 sitting — but every other subject remains primarily a matter of a student's own school's discretion. Because Belgium devolves education authority to its language communities rather than governing it nationally, the CESS is specific to the French Community alone; a student at a Flemish Community school receives a separately governed credential instead. This makes consistent, visible engagement with regular schoolwork across the entire final year — not concentrated preparation for one decisive exam period — the single most consequential factor in most students' actual CESS outcome.