BarcelonaThe trickle of complaints about what the new selection exams will be like continues. Beyond the concern over the fact that, with the course already started, neither teachers nor students yet know what the new university entrance exams (PAU) will look like, several Catalan and Spanish language teachers are now criticizing that the new exam models of their subject imply an increase in the syllabus for which their students are not prepared. Unlike what happened with the history exam, where some teachers saw with displeasure that with the start of the course the structure of the test changed almost completely, in the case of the Catalan and Spanish languages, the structural changes they are not that big compared to previous models, but there is a very prominent modification that comes from the elimination of compulsory reading at high school: in the new PAU reading comprehension will be worth half of what it was until now.
Both in Catalan and in Spanish, the reading comprehension section will go from being worth 4 points to being worth 2, since the two questions that until now were dedicated to the compulsory high school readings have not been replaced by other comprehension questions reader, but have been deleted directly. “It’s much more complicated to be able to teach a literary skill in such a narrow way, and even more so in such a short time”, laments a Catalan teacher from the Maresme. Broadly speaking, as communicated in this week’s meetings with high school teachers, the tests for the two languages will have four main sections: reading comprehension (2 points), written expression (3 points), linguistic reflection (3 points) and literary knowledge (2 points).
One of the changes regarding the syllabus that high school students will have to study is that, in both Spanish and Catalan, a question related to dialect varieties may appear. Of course, it would be part of a block of optional questions, among which there will also be questions about phonetics, error detection or minimal pairs (words that only vary by a single phoneme like ‘so’ and ‘so much’).
On the other hand, one of the parts that most worries the teachers consulted by this newspaper is that of literary knowledge where the metric is introduced (when the structure of the poems is analyzed), which until now was not included in the tests and also several theoretical questions about rhetorical figures and literary elements and themes. “It’s a shame because all of this makes us waste time studying the history of Catalan authors. It’s good that they know what hyperbole is, but it would also be great to be able to explain to them who Quim Monzó is,” criticizes a Catalan language teacher.
For all that, Spanish and Catalan teachers warn that this year’s exams will be more difficult and that they will include memorization aspects that had not been studied in the last 6 or 7 years. “They said it would be more competitive, but now there is more theory that the students have not done in the first year of high school and it is difficult content to transmit with what is left of the course and with only two hours a week of this subject,” insists one head of the Spanish department at a high school in Vallès. In fact, according to ARA, there is already a group of Spanish teachers who are writing a letter of complaint to the PAU coordinators, in which they criticize that the information they have received about the tests is “confusing” .
Student strike
Although in the last two weeks the Department of Research and Universities has been holding meetings with high school teachers to explain to them the new exam models for each subject, at this time, the new tests still cannot be consult anywhere For this reason, the Students’ union has called a strike by students throughout the territory in high school, but also in secondary and FP, to demand that the new models be “published now”.
At the same time, the Government has also made a call this Friday to explain at what point the process of adapting the 2025 tests to the new state regulations is and to explain some of the main novelties of the PAU.
