One of my friends convinced me I should put this information about the school out in the open so people can make a more informed decision about it, if it's worth their time. Also when I was researching the school I didn't find many negative reviews, this might just be because most of the people that went are there are operating under selection bias and want to give it a good review because they want a post hoc justification for going to a radically different "school". So first some back story.

Because of unfortunate life circumstances I never graduated highschool and had to live on my own since I was 16. So for about 5 years I worked just saving my money, never owned a car or anything so that I could go back to university one day. I've always been into computers and animation so I was pretty tech savy already but about 3-ish years ago I finally decided to pick up programming.

Coincidentally I had been taking some French courses just for fun so naturally I was excited when I heard about school 42. They market themselves as a new innovative, meritocratic, and free school system but of course there is more than meets the eye and there is some sort of catch. According to their marketing material if you just work hard and have passion for tech you will pass the entrance exams (assuming you pass the online test)! To quote one of "instructors", if you can call them that, in their videos you watch during the beginning of the piscine "I've never met anyone who showed up for 10 hours every day who didn't pass the piscine". You will see in a moment why that's bullshit.

So I did some math and figured out that moving to Paris and going to 42 was cheaper (including living expenses) than trying to get into school in my country. Not to mention I would waste thousands on upgrading and would take about a year of doing unrelated highschool courses before I could even think about applying to a university locally.

During the piscine you have to show up every day for at least 10 hours for 4 weeks as well as get a decent mark... maybe. I'm a self starter and a bit of an autodidact so I'm usually highly motivated and this wasn't a problem for me especially if it meant I finally could get into a "real" school. I averaged 12 hours every single day.

But then the weird things started to happen, that were on a slippery slope of being "trolling" or discipline to what I consider borderline abuse. Or at least putting people in positions of power that they were almost encouraged to abuse. I talked to almost no actual staff the entire time I was there as they want you to learn everything on your own, which I'm okay with however all of the few interactions I had with staff were very negative. They have a very holier-than-thou type of attitude which also seems to have rubbed off on some of the full time students. And it wasn't like I was asking them about the course work itself, it was more like "wheres the bathroom?", or "my key card isn't working" ect.

Some of the weird things were the exams. The first exam they give you no info on what to do and you have no internet access. You have to open up a file in command line and access the exam program. And if you don't do it within the first 5 minutes you are kicked out of the exam and marked 0. Needless to say 80% of the people failed it.

These next bits are rumors because I didn't observe them directly but was told by some friends. During some of the exams they let the campus cat roam the exam rooms. If she touches you, automatic fail and you have to leave the exam.

Another one was "battleship". The exam supervisors sit in a room playing battleship and the board corresponds the the exam room. If they sink a ship in your area, your entire table gets a fail.

Finally my personal experience during the final 8 hour exam. I asked a supervisor if I could use the washroom. I was permitted and I went. I was in there for less than 5 minutes and was given no restrictions or time limits. As I was finishing up I hear someone yell (in French) "is anybody from the exams in here?!" I figured it was a cleaner or something and I wasn't sure how to reply exactly in French. I figured I was walking out in 15 seconds so it shouldn't be a big deal. I washed my hands and walked out. As I was about to re-enter the exam room some staff member who didn't have an ID or anything to identify himself other than a STAFF shirt yelled (in French) "YOU! STOP! Come here!". I had never seen this guy before nor did I understand why he was stopping me. He started berating me in French with the subtext of kicking me out of the exams because I didn't answer him immediately while I was wiping my ass. I pretended that I didn't understand him and just said "sorry I don't speak french". He begrudgingly let me back into the exam room. The weird thing was that the supervisor that gave me permission to go was standing beside him the whole time and never chimed in to say anything. It was freaking bizarre to say the least.

Finally the exams were over and I waited to hear the results. You can see everyones scores during and after the exams and I did pretty well as I was in the top 20% out of about 800 people.

The results were in. All you get is a short email with no information as to why you failed. I didn't get in. Even though they claimed that being in the top 30% was usually good enough and so was showing up everyday.

I was curious about taking it again since I didn't really have very many options for school and the official website that you login to actually read "try again next time when new slots open up!" However one of my French friends told me that it wasn't possible. He sent me a link to a blog post from over a year ago which was on their tumblr that stated they would stop allowing retries at some point in the year. I was skeptical that this was even official information as the tumblr blog looked like some default theme that tumblr has and looked almost like something 15 year old girl would design. And this information wasn't in any of their English language material either. It was extraordinary unprofessional looking especially for an "innovative" tech school. So I emailed them to ask if it was possible to which they basically replied "oh sorry we need to update the website". Again, very unprofessional. I was very unimpressed. You'd think that having an up to date website would be a priority for such an organization. With that said I had heard that some people snuck their way in and took the exams more than once by swapping their first and last names in the registration forms since they don't keep any copies of your official ID until you've passed the piscine. They either don't care or are too incompetent to make sure people don't game the system that way apparently.

To add insult to injury a few friends I knew that got in told me that literally every single girl that showed up every day got accepted into the school. Including ones that had very low scores. So they have some affirmative action policies for entrance which means it's not a meritocracy. One of the girls I knew that got accepted had never programmed in her life before the piscine and handed in about half the amount of assignments as I did. I estimated that at least 100 people got accepted who had a lower score than me. Initially I thought they were super advanced and using some sort of advanced AI algorithm to determine which students pass or fail. But the truth is much more banal. I heard that the final decisions are made by some random panel of guys who look at some basic info on you for about 1-2 minutes and decide if you pass or fail. This is a huge problem in their system as you randomly get assigned people to check and that check your work as well as random teams for team assignments. In these checks they rate you and sometimes write comments. The problem is that this might not capture how well you actually work with people as I'd say at least 50% of the time or more I was helping out friends in undocumented ways. So it's like if you don't work really well with random strangers then your screwed. But it probably doesn't matter that much since the selection criteria seem to be pretty arbitrary anyway.

If you are a very motivated person and can work on your own 42 might be okay, especially if you are a girl and possibly minority of some kind. I know there is a lot of students that lose motivation and I knew a few people that once they got in kind of just dicked around and would only spend a couple hours a day there or would spend most of their time on facebook since there is no formal structure. Meanwhile motivated individuals such as myself get kicked to the curb for bullshit reasons.

conclusion: Unless you happen to live near one of the 42 campuses or its various clones and it doesn't involve any major life changes or risks such as relocating, I would not recommend it. And if you do get in I would get out as soon as you can. Use it as an opportunity for networking and to get internships. That's it. Even the curriculum isn't really anything groundbreaking or interesting. It's pretty much just a bunch coding puzzles/assignments and you use google as your text book and professor. The few videos they had giving information were pretty sub par and you can find much better, high quality youtubers that are much more informative and entertaining to learn from. Even sites like udacity are light years ahead of them IMO.

If you want to learn to code, I would say spend 60% of your time working on fun personal projects(ideally with the potential for income generation), 20% taking cheap bootcamps or moocs, and another 20% doing networking activities like meetups or competitions. Although I do have a feeling that the programmer market is starting to become over-saturated a bit as it is so easy to learn now days. Not that there's no work or that it's not a useful skill to have as a secret weapon, but that wages are starting to go down a bit.

If you have any questions about it feel free to AMA. Theres lots of other weird stuff and cult behavior I saw there, but for brevity I tried to just keep the highlights.