Yesterday, the Ministry of Education and Vocational Training conducted a pilot test of the new Baccalaureate Assessment exam for University Access (Ebau) in 50 centers in all the Spanish autonomous communities, Ceuta and Melilla, with the exception of those governed by the Popular Party, Aragon and the Basque Country. This pilot test, as reported by the ministry, is aimed at “harmonizing the university entrance exams, which will begin to be implemented – progressively – in 2024, with the competency-based nature of the new curriculum”. This year the tests that will be held in June will still be identical to those that took place last year.
Each student exclusively did two exercises: one from a common subject and another from the compulsory subject of the modality they are taking. The students had 105 minutes (previously they had 90) to take each test – one of the novelties of the new Ebau – since, according to the same ministry, “the reading of the exercise is taken into account, its analysis and production” and that the tests will include less rote exercises in which the student will have to reflect.
The pilot test was carried out in a group of first-year high school students from each of the selected centers, since the new Lomloe has not yet been implemented in the second year (it was introduced first in the odd-numbered courses) and aims to analyze the degree of adaptation of students to this type of competence test, the time set for the exercises, the comparison between the different possible models of exercises developed and the reliability of the correction, among other things.
In this pilot, the common subjects of the first year of high school, which have a continuity to the second year, were evaluated. Specifically, Spanish Language and Literature I, Foreign Language I (English) and Philosophy were evaluated as common subjects; and as subjects of the Artistic Drawing I modality, of the Arts modality; Latin I, from the Humanities and Social Sciences modality; and Mathematics I, from the Science and Technology modality.
The students who faced the Philosophy test had to choose between an excerpt from Bertrand Russell’s book History of Western Philosophy and another excerpt from Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition. In both they were asked to answer four questions. “What is the philosophical question that the text addresses?”, was one. They were also invited to reflect on an image (they could choose between) and answer four more questions.
At the Moisès Broggi Institute in Barcelona, ??29 of the 33 students who took part in the test faced the English exam (four took the French). Some of the students who opted for the English test, such as Oriol, Laia and Jana, demanded “more time” to do the listening exercise. In the end, they explained to Europa Press that the listening included audios of natives with “accents from other countries” that are not English or American, to which they are more accustomed, and that it had cost them.
The test, which started at 9:10 a.m. and ended at 10:55 a.m., included among other exercises a listening comprehension test on access to drinking water and sanitation facilities in India and included two activities: first, students had to answer the correct option (out of four possible) of five questions; then, they had to fill in the blank space of five sentences with a word.
Another test was reading comprehension, about the possibility of making policies so that countries with droughts can achieve water independence, and the exercises consisted of using an appropriate adjective, noun or verb about a description given in a sentence ; seven test exercises with four possible answers and one question exercise in which the students had to write an answer sentence.
The head of foreign languages ??at the center, Nati Castillo, emphasized that in the English exam the questions “do not penalize the student if he makes a mistake”; that gives the student more freedom (for example, choosing five out of seven questions), and that the texts are shorter and more topical.
Participating students will not be evaluated nor will any statistics be drawn up by centers or communities. This is a test to analyze whether the work done by the working groups is going in the intended direction.
