The students are fed up. It is October and, although some basic indications are filtered, it is not yet officially defined what the selectivity test (Ebau) will look like. And they have said enough. They take action. The Student Union has called a strike for this coming Friday the 11th in Secondary, Baccalaureate and FP.
“There is great uncertainty among second-year Baccalaureate and Vocational Training students who take the Selectivity exam. How is it possible that such an important exam for us, which determines our future at university, has not yet been published? There are teachers who tell us that they improvise every day. If to this is added the anxiety, the stress and everything that accompanies the second year of high school precisely because you risk everything during an exam to enter the university where we have been in class for a month and we we still know nothing, this is obviously a big blow for the mental health of students,” explains Coral Latorre, general secretary of the Students’ Union.
Something is known, but nothing very precise. What seems more related is that the test will take place on June 3, 4 and 5, a homogenization without precedent until now. For the rest, the Government has defined the guidelines for what should be the biggest reform of this exam in 40 years, but it is now time to base it on a specific exam model. This stage takes more time than those who have to take the exam would like, knowing that – although it should not be the case, it is practically inevitable – the last year of post-compulsory secondary school is essentially devoted to preparation for this exam. And a month after the start of the school year, there is nothing specific to prepare.
This course will constitute the transition from the usual Ebau to a model that adapts to Lomloe and evaluates the learning of the skills it advocates, even if for the moment it will do so in a somewhat timid way. The Department of Education took a few years, but it finally did its part after some back and forth – like the maturity test it wanted to establish and ended up abandoning – and defined what it wanted this test be.
Little by little, the exam model takes shape. There is a proposal document prepared by the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE), which, although it must be validated by the autonomous communities, will probably be very similar to the final design of the test. At the moment they already have the approval of the PP, which has a good part of the autonomous power and therefore powers over Ebau in its territories (beyond the general framework established by the Ministry of Education) and which also presented a basic proposal, put forward this Monday by The world.
Only one model
Unlike what has happened in recent years, the exam will be less optional. “Each subject will present a unique exercise model which will be structured into different sections or blocks,” explains CRUE. Underlying this change is the idea that students must study the entire syllabus, which the previous model did not guarantee by allowing them to choose between different exam models.
What may be included is “the ability to choose between multiple questions or tasks in certain sections if deemed appropriate.” Each exam will last 90 minutes.
Competent, but not so much
The test proposed by the CRUE for this course limits the skills part – supposed to be very new – to a minimum of between 20% and 25% of the questions, while the text itself specifies that “the tests will have a conception of skills for check the degree of achievement of specific skills in access and admission subjects.
The rectors seem aware that it is a slow change, but they explain that it is a question of making the change of model more navigable, which in addition to being one in itself is carried out on the basis of ‘a model that has become more flexible during Covid. The objective, they say, is to “minimize the impact derived from the transition from 2024 COVID-type models to models in the format of Royal Decree 534/2024”.
University officials are also opening the door to the inclusion of questions in various formats, more or less open, “as long as the mark awarded to the questions/tasks with open and semi-constructed response reaches at least 70%”.
A common solution
This, experts say, is the element that can most unite the tests at the national level, given the impossibility of doing it from the program because each community has its own. The Government’s Royal Decree already includes new developments in this area, with “a structure, basic characteristics and minimum correction criteria common to the entire territory”.
The Ministry of Education has already left it black and white in its basic regulations that, for all exercises, the marking and correction criteria will include, among other things, parameters allowing the evaluation of aspects such as adaptation to what is required in the statement, coherence, cohesion and grammatical, lexical and spelling correction of the texts produced, as well as their presentation. Furthermore, the evaluation corresponding to these elements of coherence, cohesion, etc. must count for at least 10% of the mark (one point) for the corresponding question or task.
The ‘common’ Ebau of the PP
The PP, which has made Common Selectivity one of its battlegrounds, is showing its chest these days because the model proposed by the CRUE validates its proposal, support the popular. The party – which began to talk about a “single” exam and lowered it to “common” because educational skills prevent having the same throughout Spain – has prepared a document with what will be the exam that will be taken in the autonomous communities where they take place. govern the popular peoples (Andalusia, Aragon, Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Cantabria, Castile and León, Valencian Community, Extremadura, Galicia, La Rioja, Madrid and Murcia and Ceuta).
Alberto Núnez Feijóo’s party recovers for this edition of the test the “specification matrices” which had been used in a rather lax manner. These matrices are essentially a detailed catalog of what is included in the exam to standardize the content: for example, listing the philosophers who may appear in an exam question for that topic. Or, in the opposite direction, by choosing to leave aside the weight of questions such as “the struggle for the emancipation of women and feminist movements” or “the mechanisms of domination and gender roles”.
The Galician example
With all these premises – decree of the Royal Government, CRUE proposal, popular agreement – the Galician Ministry of Education has published some exam models that allow us to get closer to what the communities will do.
Galician officials have designed a series of tests in which there are four compulsory questions, you cannot choose, although there are optional answers in the questions. One of these four exercises is focused on skills, thus respecting what is proposed by the CRUE.
This is observed in the mathematics test. The first question involves an overview and asks you to apply the knowledge (the theoretical idea under the skills), as you can read it.
The rest of the questions are more normal: problem, equation, answer.
The same dynamic is observed in the chemistry exam. The first question, always competitive, asks the student to put themselves in the shoes of a group of National Geographic geologists who are going to explore the Atacama Desert. The student is asked to “design an emergency kit including instant hot and cold compresses.”
The other three questions follow the most common lines.
