The teachers and students who they will start the second year of high school in the next few days they will one less unknown. The usual concerns at this level (in which they will finish their secondary education, decide their future between university and vocational training and must achieve the results that allow them to access the studies of their choice) will not be added doubts about how to prepare for the selectivity tests next summer, when Finally, the new format still to be approved will not be applied yet.
Last spring, the Ministry of Education decided to postpone, after the call for general elections, the processing of the new test model to be applied in 2024. There was therefore the possibility that this course should be prepared and started in September without knowing what would be required of the students next June. It is true that the baccalaureate must be a formative episode with its own objectives and purposes, and not a preparation course for the university (like the late COU) or even less preparation for an exam. A test that is still necessary to order the demand and offer of university places without being defined only by the greater or less laxity when evaluating each educational center, but that it should not condition what and how it is taught. But it is inevitable, as long as an examination of this type is maintained, that at least in part it will be so.
The same ‘councillor’ for Universities of the Generalitat, Joaquim Nadal, already pointed out last February, even before the decree remained in a drawer, that perhaps it would be convenient to postpone the application of the new selectivity until 2025, to that even first-year high school students started it knowing the rules of the game. Indeed, there is time to reach the proposed date to complete the transition to the new model (2028) without the need to start the course with an unnecessary capsize.
The current organic education law, the Lomloe, approved in 2020, It establishes that both the educational strategies in secondary school and the test that later regulates the access to the university must have competence characteristics rather than memory. With longer exams and exercises that will require more reflection, association of ideas and application of the contents acquired to the resolution of questions. It is something that, to many students who have passed them in recent years, will not sound strange. This process of pedagogical transformation is more mature in some autonomous communities, as is the case of Catalonia, than in others. It is one of the consequences of the territorial model currently in force in the Spanish educational system, incompatible with some of the claims that the new test is radically uniform.
The reorientation of the entire system from a model of content memorization to another of maturation of the necessary skills to acquire them at any time in life, and apply them in practice, is often caricatured as a renunciation of excellence. The formulation of the selectivity test as a real and applied test of academic maturity However, it does not have to represent a reduction in the level of lack of demand. On the contrary, there should be nothing more demanding of the student than putting him before the need to think. nmno to put before the need to think.