This time of the year is vital for millions of students around Brazil. The entrance examinations season for higher education begins with the National High School Examination (ENEM), organized from the Ministry of Education. The enem 2018 was originally brought to assess the quality of secondary-level education in the united states, nevertheless it has changed to your content test now useful for other purposes. Included in this are being utilized for an admissions test for the main federal universities and other public institutions, like a strong impact on the distribution of financial support to students, and also as a need for fellowships and programs such as the Science Without Borders program.
You will find almost 8 million students enrolled for this particular year’s exam, that are competing for about 250 thousand places inside the federal higher education system, the so-called Unified Selection System (SISU). This examination is offered simultaneously through the entire whole country, within the old design of printed examination copies requiring hand-written responses; this presents many logistical challenges and represents a tremendous cost. Furthermore, the very idea of the exam itself has proven detrimental to secondary education, as brilliantly discussed by Simon Schwartzman in the recent blog post.
First of all, the growing dominance of the exam-that will require rather deep knowledge of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, English, Portuguese, history, geography and writing- now effectively shapes the high school curriculum with clear disadvantages for people who is not going to get involved in the SISU as well as those who will not want to affect any college by any means. As revealed by Luiz Carlos Freitas in the blog, it is well known that policies based on “decisive” tests are getting to be a serious detriment for the learning procedure for students. Actually, it is worth mentioning that California just banned its senior high school exit exam. The SFGate reported, “Some studies revealed that many California students who didn’t pass the exit exam performed along with those that did, if it got to other academic indicators including annual standardized tests and sophistication work, indicating that factors apart from academic ability could be at play.”
In Brazil, we should develop a secondary education curriculum that could accommodate a definite amount of diversity, as is carried out in many other countries, not a single curriculum oriented with an examination that may be not highly relevant to all. A standard, general education core needs to be the basis of all the programs, combined with elective paths offering either a more specific and deeper knowledge for individuals who desire to pursue further academic studies or possibly a more specialized advanced schooling career or professional or technical preparation for graduates that will go into the labor market upon completing studies. As pointed out by Schwarztman, “the high school needs to be a period of training and qualification, general and professional, and never an extended preparatory course to a college that only a few will attend”. Thus, the enem 2018 would have to be modified, working on the evaluation of the secondary degree of instruction, considering the inevitable diversity students and student objectives inside the system. It needs to be a general knowledge test with a focus on communication and mathematical reasoning with some other evaluations for the different paths that can be pursued by different students, such as a certification system for that technical and professional careers.
In the logistics viewpoint, it is clear the old style of printed tests applied throughout the country is insane, along with the exam should be offered at different moments and in different locations, using modern communication and information technologies and devices, as utilized to administering tests elsewhere around the globe.
One of the main justifications of your “unified entrance character” in the sisu 2018 was it will make access to higher education more democratic, as it enables students from any town to apply for a place at any federal university anywhere in the country. However, besides the absence of financial support for students to move with other places to study, the effective use of a huge test creates a far more elitist situation. HEIs positioned in regions far away from the better developed portion of the country have some of their degree programs loaded with students who definitely have relocated from wealthier region and skewing dexspky96 local applicant pool. This pushes cut-off scores higher, and the universities lose the possibility of selecting students more suited to the institution’s professional and pedagogical objectives. Despite having the current policy of reserving at least 50% in the new enrollment with quotas for college students from certain racial groups or low socio-economic status, the funnel has a tendency to get even more competitive, exaggerating further inequitable access to tertiary education. Within the 2015 selection process, for example, the ration of applications per place in the quota group was greater than within the open group.
In fact, previous studies indicate that this great most of seats at federal universities in Brazil will continue being occupied by students who result from more educated families, who studied in good private schools or the few public schools of excellence which one can find across the country. Evidently, it has a direct correlation with the socio-economic status of the family, ultimately causing an asymmetry in the selection process, perpetuating the inequalities of your Brazilian society. This can be another example of the numerous challenges that Brazil must immediately face, specially in education, so that you can continue development towards an even more just and democratic country.