Botching of exam raises tensions on Brazil's access to education

SAO PAULO LETTER:The theft of the state paper in 2009 and a big mix-up this year amount to a chaotic exam system

IT’S A student’s worst nightmare. You study all year for the most important exam of your life and then the day comes and the paper in front of you makes no sense at all.

This nightmare became reality for several thousand Brazilian students sitting the country’s equivalent of the Leaving Cert at the start of the month, and it was not a question of lack of preparation or nerves on the day.

The problem was with the paper itself. Of the 3.3 million such papers handed out to students, many were incorrectly labelled by the printer hired by the Ministry of Education. A multi-choice exam, the sheet with answer options for the human science section incorrectly had answers for the natural science section, and vice-versa.

Many students quickly realised something was amiss. But poorly orientated exam monitors – some hired just the day before for the job and with no guidance on who to contact in case of problems – gave out conflicting advice.

Some of them quickly spotted the problem and advised students to switch the answer sheets. Others said to leave out the two sections until it could be discovered what was going on.

The result? This year’s exam – known as the Enem – has been thrown into chaos, has ended up in the courts and caused anger and anguish for millions of students across the country desperate to secure a place in university.

Those students affected have demanded the right to resit the paper, but this has led others in the highly competitive scramble for a place to argue that this will give some an unfair advantage, and that everyone who wants to redo the test should be allowed to do so. This has prompted calls to rerun the whole exercise, although the ministry plans just to allow the affected students to resit the paper.

The affair exposes the education ministry as being poorly managed. It is not as if this year’s fiasco is a once-off. Last year the Enem was hit by the theft of the paper just before the exam, with the thieves then trying to sell the answers.

This forced a last minute rewrite of the exam which exposed the fact that the ministry had no back-up paper or question bank on which to draw, resulting in the exam looking significantly different to what schools and teachers had been orientated to prepare for.

In principle, the Enem – in its current form only in its second troubled year – is a good idea. It is based on the national secondary school curriculum and has 180 multiple-choice questions divided into four themes: languages, human sciences, natural sciences and maths, followed by a short written comprehension test.

Previously in Brazil, universities held their own entrance exams, called the vestibular.

This involved students having to go to each institution to take its particular exam if they wanted to try for a course there. This was impossible for many, especially poorer students, in a country as vast as Brazil.

In contrast, the Enem can be taken in thousands of centres all over Brazil on the same day. Not all universities use it, but the government has been using the bait of funding as a means of getting more and more to hand out course places based on it, especially the federal universities, which contain many of the country’s top third-level institutions. Students thereby take one exam close to home and use the results to apply to courses all over Brazil, expanding access for the less well-off.

A second year though passing without the education ministry being able to organise a successful exam will only reinforce the resistance of universities which wish to retain their own vestibular.

They argue there are sound academic grounds for wanting to do so.

Studies show that the sort of multi-choice test adopted by Brazil, similar to the SAT exam used in the United States, is a poor predictor of future performance in university compared to a broader test such as the Leaving Cert or, better still, offering places based on course work carried out during secondary level, as Canada does.

However in Brazil, equality of access is a burning issue. The state spends scandalously little on public education at the primary and secondary level, but things get quite good at third level, just in time for the children of the well-off who have had the advantage of private education to snap up most of the places. The vestibular is just another barrier for poorer students.

By botching the Enem for a second year, the ministry of education has further undermined faith in its attempts to right this wrong.