The teacher who denounces that "students can get a 10 studying half of the syllabus in Selectividad"

“We have detected that students who take the Selectividad only prepare half of the agenda. Studying only half of the syllabus they can get the highest grade, a 10. We cannot allow there to be people who come to the race with that qualification and with a calculus deficit.”. The person who expresses himself in this way is María Vela, a professor of Statistics at the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration of the Complutense University and a member of one of the Madrid courts for the university entrance exam.

Vela denounces the picaresque -she calls it “study engineering to optimize results”- to which the students who attend the Evau/Ebau have been resorting since, in 2020, the Ministry of Education with Isabel Celaá at the helm decided to “make the school more flexible”. exam to give you more choice in the face of Covid problems. The pandemic has now ended, but these facilities have been maintained: students have been enjoying more options for three years when it comes to choosing which questions to answer, in such a way that they have a better chance of being able to answer what they know best. To what extent?

“In the Mathematics II subject of the Madrid Community exam there are eight questions: two on algebra, two on geometry, two on calculus and two on probability and statistics.. Of them, you have to choose four, but you can choose two from algebra and two from probability and none from calculus or geometry. Before Covid, you had to choose a complete option, A or B, which made it necessary to study the entire agenda. Not now”, explains this teacher, recognized three times as an “excellent teacher” by the Complutense, corrector for two years of the Selectividad and informal collaborator with the Office of the Vice President for Students in everything related to this exam. She has not been the one who has prepared the questions, but they are known in detail.

“Pandemic exams,” as teachers call them, are actually an à la carte menu. As the latest ministerial order says, they must allow “all students to reach the maximum score”. It is no longer a matter of students being able to choose between one or another algebra question or one or another calculus question. It is that they can select the ones that they know best, even if they are from the same block.

It does not only happen in the Mathematics exam in Madrid, but in other autonomous regions, such as the Valencian Community, and also in other subjects, such as History. “If you study from the 17th to the 19th century, you can get a 10, without knowing the previous centuries,” explains Carlos Javier de Carlos Morales, professor of Modern History at the Autonomous University of Madrid and delegate of the rector for the Selectividad between 2009 and 2021. .

“It is the pandemic model, which determines the ministerial order. With the Covid it was understandable due to the special circumstances of the confinement, but it no longer makes sense. Last year the universities proposed that the system be changed and we were told no,” says De Carlos.

Murcia History Exam, with questions to fill in the gaps.

Vela adds that the advancement of the general elections has left “everything up in the air” because the intention of Pilar Alegría, Celaá's successor, was to propose a new Selectivity format in which this waiver would disappear, but the draft royal decree It has been kept in a drawer waiting for the government that comes out of the polls to decide what to do.

Vela recalls that, in 2020, the correctors of the Mathematics exam got fed up with putting tens and nines. That 2020, only in three of the 180 exercises that she corrected had the students solved the calculus problems, the subject that chokes them the most together with geometry. He says that the easiest ones for them are algebra and statistics.. And the questions in these blocks are the ones they choose the most, although they are not always the simplest.. “What they choose less are functions and calculus, problems where you have to think a little more, master more topics and apply certain processes. They are not as systematic as algebra type problems,” says. It also reveals that, since teachers already know this picaresque, they tend to ask an easier algebra question and another more difficult one, a kind of penalty for those who study only half of the syllabus.

High school teachers confirm the existence of these practices and defend that they teach the entire syllabus during the Baccalaureate. “Everything happens in class, another thing is that students take advantage of the last weeks to prepare what they know best,” says Irene Murcia, a mathematics teacher in Valencia and president of the Critical Observatory of Educational Reality (Ocre).. “They are being given a great facility, which is what everything tends to. Families do not complain because children arrive with very good grades. You have to revalue knowledge and give importance to all the blocks, whether the students like them more or less,” he stresses.

Carlos Madrid, Mathematics teacher at the IES Diego Velázquez in Torrelodones (Madrid), warns that “students can get a 10 by responding to a part of the agenda that is given in just two months of class”, which is the time that dedicates in the second course of Baccalaureate to statistics and algebra. “The hardest and most extensive blocks are those of geometry and calculation,” he explains. He adds that this is “one of the reasons for the inflation of grades that has occurred, in addition to the fact that the difficulty of the exams has been decreasing.”

“It's not about passing the exam, but about preparing for the university,” Vela points out. “I teach Statistics in the first year of my degree and I've talked to other classmates. Although it should be carefully analyzed, we believe that the level with which the students arrive is not the same as in previous years”.