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This Monday, students who took the PAES 2024 for admission to Higher Education in 2025 will find out how they fared and will consider - based on their personal figures - the possibilities of applying to the courses of their choice. The process does not stop: at 08:00 hours the results will be available online and an hour later the admission period will open and will run until Thursday, January 9.
As always, La Moneda will monopolize the information and hold a ceremony with a select number of students who have achieved what is known today as “Distinctions for the educational career,” which involves not only maximum scores, but also students under other parameters. Prior to that, very early on Monday, the Mineduc will deliver general figures of what the PAES was. That is in formal terms.
Is PAES an effective tool for starting the admission process to Higher Education?
Let us remember that this instrument came to replace the old PSU, successor of the PAA, with a small margin of transition which was the PDT (Transition Test).
The PAES was presented by the current government as a “more equitable system, encouraging the entry of applicants from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds and underrepresented populations in tertiary education, especially university education.” In addition, “the Higher Education Access Program (PACE) has been strengthened, increasing both the number of students who can access a place in university education, as well as the number of places offered in the 29 partner universities, especially in the most selective courses. As if that were not enough, the Mineduc added another initiative: “More Women Scientists (+MC), which allowed the opening of more than 2,300 additional vacancies, exclusively for women, in 410 programs related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, at 39 universities affiliated to the System,” aimed at “increasing the participation of women in these areas of study.”
Whether all these changes introduced to the system have been beneficial should be known this year, because their implementation will take three years, a prudent time to make statistics and comparisons. Has the gap between private and public schools been reduced? The figures that are already known from the previous two years do not seem to indicate an improvement. Has the incorporation of these students into Higher Education under “other variables” been effective? Is there a dropout rate in the first or second year and in what percentage? Do they have an acceptable performance in the courses they are studying?
DISTINCTIONS FOR EDUCATIONAL CAREER (DTE)
A document provided by the Seremi of Education O'Higigns with official figures indicates that "the DTE take a valuable step towards the recognition of academic performance during secondary education and the PAES, but also of the different educational paths that students must follow to participate in the admission process and enter tertiary education."
In the 2024 admission process (with PAES 2023), 269 distinctions were awarded nationwide: 6 for PeSD, 20 for Indigenous Peoples, 19 for Teaching Modalities and 224 for Territories. 157 distinctions were awarded to male students and 112 to female students.
In our O'Higgins region, in this particular instance, 15 distinctions were awarded to applicants.
In terms of achievements in performance, there were about twenty students who achieved maximum scores in one or more of the PAES tests, most of them, of course, from private educational establishments.