The original article requires translation.
To obtain the maximum grade, it will be necessary to correctly answer questions that cover between 75% and 80% of the syllabus of each subject, so students must prepare all the content.
Once September has started, so has the school year, and like every year, second-year high school students begin with their sights set on June to take the so-called University Entrance Exam (PAU) .
After years of wanting to change this exam, this will finally be done in 2025. The changes will begin by establishing common and homogeneous criteria for all territories, both in format and when evaluating. It must be remembered that the tests cannot be the same throughout Spain because the competencies in Education are governed by the autonomous communities , and each region has a different educational system. One of the first changes has been to recover the name that until now was called Selectividad , recovering the name it had a decade ago, but which has also been called the Baccalaureate Evaluation for University Access (EBAU or EvaU), among others.
The coordinators of the university entrance exams in different autonomous communities have reached an agreement to standardize these exams . Among the new features, it is worth highlighting that there will only be one model for each exam , instead of two that established the possibility of choosing, as had been the case until now. However, it will be possible to choose between the sections of each exercise. This is established in the consensus document to which the newspaper El País has had access and which comes three months after the Government decided what the new criteria for the entrance exam to Spanish universities would be . During this time, the text has been worked on in several meetings and will finally be ratified by Spanish universities this Friday at the meeting of the Conference of Rectors of Spanish Universities (CRUE) held in Bilbao.
More demanding tests
According to the aforementioned newspaper, in addition to having a single model, the tests will include between 20% and 25% of questions aimed at evaluating the students' skills, focused on the relationship of concepts, and will be mandatory. To obtain the maximum score, it will be necessary to correctly answer questions that cover between 75% and 80% of the syllabus of each subject , so students must prepare all the content.
At least 70% of the answers must be open-ended or require short answers. The agreement provides that in exams in Spanish, co-official languages and foreign languages, 10% of the grade will depend on “coherence, cohesion, grammatical, lexical and orthographic correctness, as well as presentation” . In the rest of the subjects, this rule will apply to tasks that require the “composition of a long text”.
Each exercise will last 90 minutes , with a minimum break of half an hour in the event of consecutive exams. Students with specific educational support needs will be entitled to more time to complete each exercise, if their necessary adaptation so requires and without affecting the duration of their breaks.
This is not the end of the story. According to the text, the idea is to continue working on improvements “together” in order to reach “the greatest possible consensus and a homogenization of the subjects throughout the Spanish territory.”