„Please, if you care about your future, or your child's, niece, nephew, brother, read what follows. It is very important. And sign my petition. Together we will achieve the goal, change things and put an end to this injustice.“

Roy Castrillo Puente and already more than 190.000 followers are making this request to you because each autonomous community in Spain sets its own rules for the university education entrance examination. This situation leads to great differences in the grades and thus in the decision on admission. It also puts an end to distorting competition between the autonomous communities, which want to achieve better marks for their pupils by lowering the examination standard. This polishes up the image of their education system and conceals shortcomings. This applies in particular to autonomous communities in which Spanish skills are poorly acquired and history and other teaching materials are only taught indoctrinatively.

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„We are in the middle of a debate about the injustice generated by the fact that each Autonomous Community makes its own entrance test to the University, the classically called 'selectividad', currently called PBAU or EBAU. The injustice consists in the fact that, as they are different tests, it cannot be guaranteed that all of them have the same difficulty, so that one student can have a higher grade than another, not because he knows more, but because in his Autonomous Community the test is easier than in the other. This is very important, because it is this grade that is used to establish the entry priority for each university degree in each of the Spanish universities.

The problem has been revived this year 2019, because the test of Mathematics II of the Autonomous Community of Valencia was considered by students as spectacularly difficult, and that this caused them to have a lower score than students from the rest of the Autonomous Communities. They made a petition to solve this problem through the internet platform Change.org, and have already collected 45,670 signatures. On the other hand, on 17 June 2019, five students from the Community of Castilla y León handed over 178,000 signatures to the Ministry of Education asking for a single selectivity for the whole of Spain. They had begun collecting signatures the previous year, through the same platform, and now have 189,800.

The problem also exploded in the Balearic Islands, due to the fact that the Mathematics and History of Spain exams were considered excessively difficult. In Mathematics only 54% of the students passed, and in Spanish History 60%. The university professors responsible for these exams were criticized from the rector's office, and this reached the media. It should be remembered that last year the selectivity marks for History of Spain and Spanish Language in the Balearic Islands were the lowest in Spain. One solution proposed by the students is to take exams that are easier and in which fewer subjects come into play than those established throughout Spain, as is already the case in other Autonomous Communities. But this would not be a good solution, but an aggravation of the problem, because other Communities, due to the lack of external control, could also decide to make them easier so that their students would not look bad.

The only way to solve this problem is to establish a single selectivity test or EBAU for the whole of Spain. This would imply that the examinations of the different subjects should be the same, except those of the second co-official language in bilingual Communities, and that the examinations should be taken on the same day in all of them. On the other hand, the correction should be carried out by teaching officials directly dependent on the Ministry of Education, in order to coordinate the correction criteria.

For the preparation of the tests, the Ministry should organize teams of teachers in each of the specialties, in which there should be people from different Autonomous Communities. These teams would have a whole year to prepare for the test, and should be renewed periodically, for example every four years. It is not necessary that in all subjects there should always be a representative of each Community, but that the renewal should be programmed taking this criterion into account. These teams should be made up of baccalaureate teachers, who really know the contents and levels taught in baccalaureate classes, and university teachers in this speciality, in order to guarantee scientific correctness and the updating of knowledge of the questions. In each Autonomous Community, a follow-up commission should be established, which would be in contact with the teams of teachers responsible for preparing the tests.

It would be a good idea to publish examples of examinations two years before the first single selectivity, so that the baccalaureate teachers could get to know them before the beginning of the course and be able to plan how best to prepare their students. Likewise, one year before the first single selectivity, a test should be carried out applying it to only a small part of the students in each Community, in order to be able to detect possible errors and thus avoid their repetition the following year, in which all the students would already participate.

Taking the same University entrance exam throughout Spain would avoid the comparative grievances between students from different Communities, which would be forced to take increasingly easy tests in order not to harm their students and, furthermore, would increase the culture of effort in both secondary and university education.“

The article of Dr. Jimeno appeared first on July 6, 2019 in Cronica and was translated from Spanish to English using DeepL Translator