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After criticism of the controversial maturity test that the Government wanted to implement in the new Selectividad (EBAU) , the Ministry of Education has reversed its elimination, as stated in the draft of the royal decree project regulating the University access.
In addition to this novelty, the Ministry of Education adds two others. The first is that the time taken to complete the exams increases from 90 minutes to 105, that is, 15 more minutes. The justification, according to the text, is that the new Selectivity exams will include less memory exercises in which the student must reflect before answering.
The second novelty that is included is that if the student does not agree with the grade obtained for an exercise, they may request, as up to now, a second review and, if the difference between the two grades is equal to or greater than two points, the court rater will have to do a third review.
History or Philosophy
What this draft does confirm, which has already been sent to the autonomous communities, is that students, at the time of enrolling in the university entrance exam, can choose between taking the History of Spain or History of Philosophy exam .
This is a claim that student representatives have been asking for for years after the PP eliminated History of Philosophy a decade ago as a compulsory subject in Baccalaureate.
This new test, which will repeal the norm approved by the PP, will be more competent and less memory, since its objective is to evaluate the student's ability to develop their knowledge to solve a problem, according to the draft of Education.
Co-official language exam
The tests will deal with the common subjects and the compulsory specific subject of each of the modalities, taken or validated in the second year of Baccalaureate. In regions with a co-official language, students must take another exam in that language to verify their knowledge.
To calculate the university entrance mark, 60% of the average obtained in Baccalaureate will be taken into account and the remaining 40% will correspond to the qualification of the university entrance exams.
What is the maturity test
The maturity test initially proposed by the Department of Pilar Alegría in July last year consisted of a series of documents on the same topic (current, humanistic, scientific...) related to compulsory subjects.
With this material, it was intended that the student carry out an analysis from different perspectives, answering different types of questions (closed, semi-constructed and open). The objective was to assess the ability of students to analyze, assess, extract information and interrelate all this documentation.
This exercise consisted of questions in Spanish , the foreign language that the student has studied and also with the co-official language in the communities that have it.
Criticism of this maturity test did not wait, not only from the student body, but also from teachers, unions, the Royal Spanish Academy of Language and some parties, such as the Popular Party.