The Catalan union Professors de Secundària (CSC) has denounced in a statement signs of arbitrariness in the corrections of the biology and geology exams in the extraordinary oppositions for stabilization of staff, held last July, and whose grades have been known this week.
“The enormous disparity in the number of approved students depending on the court is striking – the statement notes – as is the case with the biology specialty. We see that there are courts that have only approved 39% of the applicants, while others have approved at 94%.”
Sources from the Ministry of Education respond that these notes are provisional since the procedure is still open. There are two business days to claim after the note is published. “At the end of the month they will have been resolved and we will have the definitive data,” they add.
The candidates to win a position as a secondary school Natural Sciences teacher were distributed among 11 courts that welcomed around a hundred candidates each. They are part of the Education macro-call to stabilize 14,238 teaching positions, who are State officials. They were carried out together with the oppositions of Generalitat officials that the Government was forced to repeat due to the irregularities committed in April by the subcontracted company.
The teacher exam consisted of two phases. The development of a topic, among five possible ones, and the presentation of a learning situation that required an oral defense.
This week the Natural Sciences grades were published with the surprise of failures and low grades from court number 4, corresponding to Baix Llobregat, located in Castelldefels.
The candidates who presented themselves to this court have prepared a statistical analysis of the set of marks obtained, concluding that there is an “unjustifiable” statistical bias between the results of this court and the rest, especially another one, number 11, in Manresa, where Passes and grades are significantly higher.
In a letter they have prepared addressed to the Minister of Education, Anna Simó, signed by a hundred opponents, they express their concern about the “extremely low” percentage of the Castelldefels court’s notes compared to other courts. This has approved 39.29% of the candidates who completed the process, an atypical statistical deviation.
That is to say, the mathematical possibility that poorly prepared applicants will be concentrated in that court is unlikely. The rest of the courts have approved, the annoying opponents explain to the minister, at least 55.56% of candidates, reaching 93.69% in Manresa.
In addition to the percentage of passes, the grades obtained range from an average of 5 in court 7 to an average of 6.5 in court 2. Again, a deviation is observed in court 4, with an average of 4.7, and in court 11, with a 6.7.
The Casteldefels court suspended 63 people, while the Bages court suspended 6. The first gave 29 approvals while the second gave it to 45. The one in the municipality of Baix Llobregat, 8 notables and the one in Manresa, 43. No excellent in Castelldefels, 6 in the capital of Bages.
“The standard deviations indicate that the average obtained in court 4 is not due to a group of applicants with especially low grades, but rather that the significantly low grades are homogeneous,” the letter indicates. And the opposite happens with court 11, the grades are uniformly higher.
It could happen that the teachers or candidates of the Baix Llobregat tribunal defended their didactic programming worse than the rest, the second part of the exam, more open to subjectivity. But opponents have also analyzed what happened in the first, more objective part of the exam. It asked that one of five themes be developed, designated by lottery and common throughout Catalonia.
Well, in this test one court, the 11th, approved 77% of those who appeared and the other, Castelldefels, only 18%. They obtained an average grade of 6.3 in Manresa and 3.4 in Casteldefels.
“The different grades of the opposition competition between courts is unacceptable, and calls into question the justice and equal opportunities of this process,” they told the counselor, exposing “serious questions” about the legitimacy of accessing the civil service in a regulated manner.
“We demand that the necessary measures be taken to guarantee equal opportunities for all applicants and restore confidence in the opposition process,” they conclude.
