The students who are now in the 1st year of high school will face the selectivity exams (PAU, EBAU) in June 2025. It will be the first promotion to take the exams according to the curriculum of the socialist education law (Lomloe), approved in 2020 .
One of the main novelties of the reform is its competence approach. What is sought is not so much the demonstration of specific knowledge, but the ability to mobilize it. In other words, little test and a lot of analysis. The twist is important. Competence work, more widespread in the primary stage than in ESO, was not frequent in high school. On the contrary The PAUs, due to the general interest they arouse, end up setting the pace and students get used to memorizing syllabuses and training with exams. From 2025, they will not “vomit” the topics.
La Vanguardia wanted to show a Spanish language and literature exam that the Department of Education of the Generalitat has made available to teachers so they can familiarize themselves with this model.
Easier? Harder? The reader will judge for himself (he can even test himself on our website). In any case, the students will not arrive blindly. The idea of ??the law is to use selectivity to encourage change in classrooms.
It must be remembered that the will of the examiners (the test is prepared by high school and university teachers) is never to fail (more than 95% pass). Selectivity, contrary to the word, does not “select”, but orders access to the studies and universities with the most demand.
The exam models posted in all subjects include three skills: information management and communication, problem solving and critical thinking. Here we analyze only the first (on the La Vanguardia website, the rest).
In this exercise, the student is asked to link a poem by Garcilaso de la Vega (A Dafne ya los brazos le crecían) with a sculpture by Bernini and a painting attributed to Piero Pollaiuolo. All reflect the Greek myth that describes Daphne fleeing from the god Apollo, struck by the arrow of Eros, and the nymph, exhausted after the race, begs for help from her father, who, to protect her, turns her into a laurel .
1. The first question asks the students three resources that serve to express the moment of transformation based on one work or another and that serve to express the dynamism of change. They can be linguistic, literary resources or related to sculpture and painting.
2. The second question explains that plastic works, unlike writing, reflect a fleeting moment in the mythological story. “Imagine that someone wants to represent, through another sculpture or painting, the final two thirds”, he suggests. “Write a description (100 words) that reflects this possible non-literary work.”
3. Here an appeal is made to the audiovisual knowledge of young people. It is considered translating Garcilaso’s proposal into a cinematographic version.
4. Students are asked to note that the author pays more attention, in the final thirds, to Apollo’s pain, ignoring the nymph’s mood. “Write, in the first person, a short monologue that reflects, from Daphne’s perspective, the renunciation of her anthropomorphic form (her status as a woman) to save herself from Apollo’s persecution.”
5. What does Garcilaso mean when he talks about “tal daño”?
What will the examiners assess? The depth when preparing coherent, cohesive academic texts with the appropriate record on subjects they have studied or of general interest. Lexicon, style and spelling.
Regarding this last point, no specific penalties are indicated for faults; they leave it to the discretion of the corrector. In any case, in the draft of the royal decree on the new EBAU, which is expected to be approved in June, it is indicated that mistakes will be penalized up to a maximum of 10% of the exam grade.
