Brazilian universities entrance exams

From Wikinfo

Jump to: navigation, search
Versão em português

In  Brazil the universities' entrance exams are called "vestibular" (not related to the medical term "vestibular system"). It's a competitive exam where only the highest ranked candidates may gain access to undergraduation courses. One of the reasons behind this system is that there are more students than vacancies on universities, so each university use a form of competitive exam to qualify candidates, accepting a smaller group, while refusing access to the lowest ranked ones. In general, the exams happen one or two times a year, once during early winter and again during early summer. Depending on the university, the vacancies and course choices offered during each season may differ, with one offering more vacancies and course choices than the other.

Contents

Minister of Education guidelines

The Minister of Education enforces a national curriculum that all national schools must follow. There is a common list of syllabuses for a wide range of subjects regarding mathematics, physics, Portuguese language and literature, history from both Brazil as well as some international history subjects, chemistry, geography from both subjects regarding national issues as well as international ones, biology and at least one foreign language. The Minister does not, however, enforces a methodology to teach all these subjects, each school is free to choose or develop its own methodology. In the same way, universities are not forced to adopt one exam model, each university has the freedom to decide how they are going to select students and how much of the national curriculum they are going to cover in their entrance exams.

There is no rule that forbids students from applying to multiple exams at the same time, assuming that the student has enough energy to go trough all of them and no two different exams may be scheduled at the same day. There is, however, a rule that forbids a student from attending two public universities or two different courses in one or more public universities at the same time. However, the student is allowed to course one public and one private university at the same time.

The Minister does not provide financial support for entrance exams, each university has to assign a special group of people that determines the exam's guidelines, fees and dates. If the university desires it can provide a lower registration fee or a zero fee for poorer students. There no public financial support for students applying for universities from other states or in cases where the list of exam locations does not include the city where the candidate lives. For security reasons it's very rare for universities to offer online exams.

In a recent attempt to ease the access to universities and remove the burden of having to study a lot of subjects that might not be related to the particular area of interest of one student, the Minister of Education has been proposing new forms of assessing students, as well as proposing new subjects and syllabuses guidelines. For example: some universities offer a long term assessing model that consists of annual exams during high school, which can then be used in conjunction with the standard entrance exam or replace it altogether. The Minister itself offers a written exam, consisting of one essay and dozens of multiple choice questions, which focuses on practical and daily-life skills rather than "scholar" or "academic" knowledge. Universities can adopt that minister's developed exam as part of their own process of selection or use it as the entrance exam altogether.

Exam's registration and final results

On the exam's registration form there can be more than one choice to apply for. For example, the applicant may have the choice to put mathematics as his/hers first choice and physics as a second choice. In such cases the university has to decide which criteria is going to take precedence over the other, whether final score or order of choices is checked first. To avoid "randomness" or wild choices, universities tend to restrict the number of choices and group courses that attain some relationship with each other. For example, one couldn't select electrical engineering and biology as his/her choices, but could select mechanical and electrical engineering for instance.

Depending on the university, courses that require practical skills such as music or arts are special choices, meaning that the candidate can compete for a vacancy in course that doesn't requires a practical skills exam. Therefore, if he/she fails at the practical skills exam, he/she is not yet eliminated from the entrance exam.

When the first list of approved candidates is published, some of them may have attended multiple entrance exams at the same time, or for various reasons, dropped off their vacancy. Because of this, some universities publish secondary lists that call the best ranked candidates that weren't listed in the first list. For example: one might have been ranked 100th in a course which offers 70 vacancies, if he/she is lucky, at least 31 candidates which are immediately above him might leave, opening vancacies for the candidates below them.

If the student is physically disabled, such as lacking the ability to write with his/her own hands or being blind, he/she may request special assistance, which may be provided by the examiners in the exam's application time. Unfortunately, not every university provides this sort of assistance.

Exam's content and methodology

There is no standard in how many questions or what subjects one exam must cover, the only Minister's driven policy is that the candidate must pass a writing task exam to prove that he/she is literate.

The exams may vary from a single writing task to very long exams that last many consecutive days, sometimes split in one qualifying phase preceding a, secondary, final exam. Under this aspect, competitive exams can be seen pretty much like competitive sports. Oral exams are very rare because they are much more subjective and much less objective in assessing candidates, and also more demanding in terms of costs. In general, exams consisting of one phase have fewer applicants, whereas exams that span two or more phases have a large number of applicants. Depending on what course the applicant chooses the candidate per vacancy ratio can be as high as over 100 to 1 or as low as fewer than 1 to 1. What drives more candidates to one or another course can be multiple factors ranging from social conditions to perspectives of higher salaries, or could be just a matter of higher population density in one particular location.

Exams which are very short usually require some basic knowledge in a few math and Portuguese multiple choice questions, spanning just one phase in as few as 2 or 3 hours in one day. On the other hand, very long exams require a lot of energy from candidates, with as many as one hundred multiple choice questions with a time limit of up to 5 hours in one day, with more exams spanning more days in a later, final phase. In some cases all high school subjects are required in both multiple choice and essay questions for a total of as many as 5 days of exams. In others the exam might span fewer days, thus, being less demanding for candidates. Depending on which course the candidate chooses and which type of exam he/she is applying for, some subjects might have more questions than others, might weight more in the final score or might even be absent altogether.

For courses such as music, architecture, arts, cinema and acting, there might be specific exams of practical skills. For example, the candidates applying for a music course might have to play a musical score. Whereas a candidate applying for an architecture course might be requested to draw in response to a very detailed drawing task for instance. Such practical exams can have a great importance in the candidate's final score, even more than the writing exams theirselves.

There can also be a mandatory list of books or films that all candidates should read or watch. There can be questions in that exam that related to those books or films, requiring some knowledge about them to be able to answer such questions.

Types of questions

The exams have basically three types of questions: multiple choice, essay and a writing task. Multiple choice questions generally have 5 choices, 4 of which are wrong and 1 is right. Although, some exams can adopt 4 choices, 3 of which are wrong and 1 is right. The writing tasks can vary from 30 lines, the most common length, up to 60 lines in some cases. The most common writing task proposals are the essay, narrative and letter or complain. More sparsely the task can propose an article or a chronicle. Some entrance exams offer to the candidates the opportunity the choose between one or another text type in the exam itself.

There is also a different approach on multiple choice questions which involves true or false statements. The question may have multiple statements about a subject, each one can be either true or false, right or wrong. The candidate is required not to check which one is right, but check all the statements which he/she thinks are true and sum the values of each of the true statements. So for example, a question may have 6 statements, three of which are false, while the other three are true. The choices are numbered in a powers of 2 progression, so the choices are {2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64}. The correct answer should be x + y + z, where x, y and z are the number of the true statements.

It's not very rare that one or more multiple choice questions to be nullified some days after the exam has been applied. There are various reasons to nullify a question: the question could have lead to misinterpretation, it could have been misprinted, some data could be wrong or absent, or among the provided choices there wasn't a true answer or there was more than one answer. In such cases the examiners must decide whether they disregard that particular question, give a free point to all candidates, or accept that more than one choice was assumed to be correct.

Essay questions can also be nullified, though it's less common. Some universities make it clear that the examiners can grade answers to those questions in a range from incorrect, partially correct, nearly correct and up to fully correct. What are the guidelines to grade the answers is kept secret to avoid any kind of influence on the candidates. There are some exams that reveal such guidelines after the final ranks have been made public and the final lists of approved candidates is published.

For writing tasks, there is a common policy of randomly assigning at least two different examinrrs that grade the candidates piece of writing while being unaware of each other. Other than the candidate's registration number, his/her identity is not revealed to the examiners. That's made to ensure a clean and uniform assessing of all pieces of writing, regardless of what each candidate wrote or his/her point of view about that particular writing task's proposal. Sometimes a group of the best pieces of writing produced in that exam is published and made public, so future applicants can have an idea of what scores higher in that particular exam's writing task.

Racial or ethnic quotas

It's currently under heated discussion whether universities should or not be forced to adopt racial quotas by the Minister of education. Some adopt on their own while others adopt quotas based on family income, some use ethnic criteria and some refuse to adopt any quota at all.

In the racial or ethnical quota systems there is a certain percentage of vacancies that is reserved for that chosen racial or ethnical group of candidates, meaning that regardless of that group's final scores, a minimum number of vacancies must be occupied by them. Sometimes the racial or ethnical criteria takes precedence over the final ranks, sometimes not.

A different system adopted by some universities in response to racial or ethnical quotas is to give free points to a group of candidates that they assume to be worthy. So for example, one university might give a free 10% bonus in the final score to a group of candidates under a certain family income range, or a free 10% bonus to all black candidates. Universities that adopt such systems argue that racial or ethnical quotas fuel prejudice among students, whereas giving free bonuses does not reserve any minimum quota.

Security

To prevent frauds there are many security measures that can be adopted during the exam period:

  • As few people as possible should have full access to to the whole exam before it's applied;
  • Examiners who are in charge of proposing exam questions must not know the questions proposed by other examiners, or must not known the questions proposed for other subjects other than his/her own;
  • Examiners must work inside a room or building with restricted access and must not leave that place while possessing any exam related material;
  • More than one exam may be proposed, so if anything unexpected prevents part of the candidates from taking the exam, or any suspicious activity compromises the exam's security, a second exam is ready to replace the compromised one;
  • The exam is printed a few hours or days before being taken by candidates to minimize the risk of being leaked by any means;
  • Candidates are forbidden of taking the exam if they do not possess a proper identity document;
  • Candidates may have to bring a photo of theirselves to prevent identity frauds;
  • No eletrical or electronic device is allowed inside the exam's rooms


Illegal actions may include:

  • One person impersonating another (the candidate may have paid for somebody else to take the exam for him);
  • The exam or part of its content may leak before being taken by candidates;
  • A candidate cheats, receiving right answers from outside by means of some hidden electronic device;
  • A candidate cheats, defrauding his/her own high school background in order to take advantage of candidate-specific advantages, such as a free 10% final score bonus to candidates who have studied in public schools;
  • Identity frauds, such as declaring yourself black to take advantage of racial quotas, thought that's an easily to unmask such attempts;
  • Someone breaks in the university's exam results database and gain access to the final results before it's officially made public;

External references

Retrieved from "http://www.wikinfo.org/index.php/Brazilian_universities_entrance_exams"