The students who are now in the 1st year of high school will face the university entrance exams (PAU, EBAU) in June 2025. It will be the first class that will take the exams according to the curriculum of the Lomloe socialist education law approved in December 2020.
One of the main novelties of the reform is its competency approach. What is sought is not so much the demonstration of specific knowledge as the ability to mobilize that knowledge and acquired learning. In other words, few test questions and many analysis questions.
The turn is important. Competency work, more widespread in the primary stage than in ESO, was not frequent in Baccalaureate. On the contrary. Baccalaureate is rote because it concludes in the university entrance tests that require the written reproduction of a syllabus. Memorization is trained.
Now there will be no syllabus to “vomit” in an exam but rather knowledge to mobilize in the reasoning that is requested. As Andreas Schleicher, director of education at the OECD and father of the PISA Report, said yesterday at the Cercle d’Economia, “The world no longer only rewards what we know, but what we can do with what we know.”
La Vanguardia has analyzed a Spanish language and literature exam that the Department of Education of the Generalitat has made available to teachers so that they can begin to become familiar with this model. They are simulations of activities for Baccalaureate that will lead to the PAU. The University Access Office will prepare a definitive model and share it in the coming months.
Easier? More difficult? The reader will judge for himself, he can even test himself and do it, if he has time. Correction criteria are included at the end.
The idea of the law is that selectivity encourages change in the way of teaching in classrooms. This means that students will not arrive blindly.
It should be remembered that the will of the examiners (the test is prepared, among others, by high school and university professors) is never to fail (more than 95% of the students who take it pass). Students who take these exams have already passed the course and have a high school or FP degree. Selectivity, contrary to the word, does not “select” but rather orders access to studies and universities with more demand for students than supply of places.
Councilor Anna Simó’s department has made exam models available to teachers with activities in all subjects with three key components: Information management and communication, integrated application of knowledge (problem solving) and critical thinking.
In Spanish language and literature it is as follows and this is the link to see this subject and others.
MANAGEMENT AND COMMUNICATION
The student is asked to link a poem by Garcilaso de la Vega (Dafne’s arms were already growing) with two artistic works, a sculpture by Bernini and a painting attributed to Piero Pollaiuolo. They all reflect the Greek myth in which Daphne flees from the god Apollo, touched by Eros’s arrow, and the nymph, exhausted, begs for help from her father who, to protect her, turns her into a laurel tree.
1. The first question asks students three resources that serve to express the moment of Daphne’s transformation based on one or another work and that serve to express the dynamism, the movement, the tension inherent to change. They can be linguistic, literary or resources related to sculpture and painting, such as, for example, the way in which the protagonists appear sculpted or painted. In addition to the resource, you must include the description and the effect it achieves. This question is valued at 2 points, although at an intermediate level you can get 1.5 and at a basic level, 1.
2. In the second question, students are asked for a text. It is explained that plastic works, unlike written works, reflect a frozen moment in the mythological story. “Imagine that someone wants to represent, through another sculpture or painting, the two final tercets,” he proposes. “Write a description, of no more than one hundred words, that reflects that possible non-literary work.” It is also scored from 0 to 2 points.
3. The third question appeals to the knowledge that young people have about audiovisual media. He states that Garcilaso’s last two quartets propose a direction of vision. “Indicate, if you had to propose a film version of such an effect, how you would translate Garcilaso’s proposal.” With this, you can get 2 more points.
4. It is suggested here that the author of the text pays more attention, in the final tercets, to Apollo’s pain, while the state of mind of the person who is persecuted is ignored. “Write, in the first person, a brief monologue that reflects, from Daphne’s perspective, her renunciation of her anthropomorphic form (her status as her woman) to save herself from Apollo’s persecution.” Two more points.
5. What does Garcilaso mean when he talks about “such damage”?
What will the examiners evaluate? The depth in producing coherent, cohesive academic texts with the appropriate register on topics they have studied or of general interest. The lexicon, style and spelling.
Regarding this last point, no specific penalties are indicated for fouls. It is stated that only those who demonstrate some lexical inaccuracy or spelling with certain errors will obtain one point. But with correct punctuation marks. They give 1.5 points to those texts with precise lexicon and adequate spelling. Finally, the maximum score goes to those who express a rich lexicon, adequate spelling and use punctuation marks with solvency.
The discount for misspellings, which is currently 0.1 for spelling, lexical or syntactic mistakes, is not required. In any case, in the draft of the royal decree on the new EBAU, which is scheduled to be approved in June, it is indicated that errors will penalize up to a maximum of 10% of the exam grade. The project does not make clear whether this applies only to languages or all exams.
For the first question, the comparison between works, it is specified that knowledge of relevant concepts (elusion, epithet, etc.) or grammatical concepts (relative, demonstrative, imperfect, etc.) will be taken into account, to explain what happens in each document. .
In the answer to the third question, the one that asks young people to write a cinematographic story, the correctors indicate that to obtain a point, the student must show a “basic ability to share the reading experience. “It establishes some plot links with other works, artistic and cultural experiences.” And it shows a certain ability to establish parallels between the three works.
At a high level, however, the examinee shows “evident mastery” in sharing their reading experience using a specific metalanguage. It may include personal interpretation, including other artistic works or experiences. He has “critical capacity” to compare the three works. “One can speak of the fact that Apollo’s suffering is generalized (as if it were the suffering of any male lover) or that the poem (not painting or sculpture) allows time to be represented, with the artistic strategies that it implies.”
In the last answer, the one related to “such damage”, the student has to show ease in identifying and rejecting discriminatory uses of the language “through reflection and analysis of the linguistic, textual and discursive elements used”. To obtain 2 points, the student can point out that, unlike Garcilaso’s poem, the painting and sculpture do not present an asymmetry with respect to the treatment between Apollo and Daphne. He points out resources that make possible both the emphasis on Apollo and the more symmetrical approach (to painting and sculpture) between Apollo and Daphne: they occupy the same space, there is a shared role, etc.
It can also be suggested that, in painting and sculpture, what happens to Daphne (metamorphosis) has greater relevance.
As for the damage caused by Apollo, it refers to the persecution and transformations that Daphne suffers, as expressed in the text.
PROBLEM RESOLUTION
It is proposed to read two articles by journalists Mayka Navarro and Icíar Gutiérrez about a criticism of the Mossos d’Esquadra and about Ukraine.
1. In a maximum of fifty words, it is requested that the contrast in interpretation that occurs between “occupied minister” (cited by Navarro) and “occupied territory” (mentioned by Gutiérrez) be shown, using the most relevant terminology.
2. “Spanish allows you to form sentences such as the territory was occupied, the territory was rebuilt, the territory was liberated and similar,” it begins. But they are ungrammatical (impossible) the territory was arrived, the territory was disappeared or the territory was born. “State a hypothesis (a grammatical principle) that explains this regular behavior.”
3. The student is asked to correctly rewrite a piece of writing by a high school student.
4. On the same text, you must argue whether the spelling problems you have corrected can be linked to grammatical aspects (for example, the relationships between predicates and arguments).
CRITICAL THINKING
Three texts are offered signed by the writers Arturo Pérez Reverte and Luis Landero and, the third, by academics in the Journal of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics. They all address the relationship between teaching grammar and reading and writing.
1. The thesis of each of the fragments must be indicated and what arguments are offered to support it.
2. The student must write an argumentative text (200 words) showing their position, with two arguments in favor and a potential counterargument.