With what moral authority does one of the former heads of the PAU, the University Entrance Exams, which have become the main stupidity of the educational system, write an article like this? An initial clarification, however, regarding the functions they have:1) Arrange in a single line all students who have completed their baccalaureate studies or equivalent and who aspire to university studies.2) Ensure that pre-university centers that have taken care of these students (in general, high schools, subsidized centers, and private centers offering baccalaureate studies or cycles equivalent to the baccalaureate) reasonably evaluate their students.Regarding the first function, it is a clear and evident reality. The entirety of the candidates are placed on a single list and the places are assigned to the university centers. But it must also be clarified that the baccalaureate grade obtained by students in their school is the determining factor for the final qualification. Part of the dishonor of the PAU (University Entrance Exam) issue is the ex post invention of adding certain optional baccalaureate subjects to the access grade, placed without a true academic discussion with different values depending on the studies the students aspire to. Thus, for the universities of Madrid, for example, Humanities subjects weigh for Psychology; for Catalan ones, they do not. Let us remember that the sophistication of epicycles kept the Sun revolving around the Earth for a number of centuries, as Ptolemy would have wanted and as the Pope effectively preferred.Regarding the second function (equalizing criteria for grades), I would not discuss it if it were truly considered. But, either it is esoteric information that perhaps the Generalitat keeps, or simply no one takes it into account. However, my opinion is that increasing its weight is the key to a simple alternative to the PAU method.
Let's go, therefore, to the critique of the first and, for now, only function. Society has accepted the enormous framework of the PAU. It has placed its trust in it to resolve a fundamental question: who guarantees us a fair selection of candidates for the places in this famous school, which have become scarce and highly sought after? Essentially, the PAU perform, in the social imaginary, this specific function.However, the real show? I don't think so and they don't even come close. The requested and undisputed function is already performed by the baccalaureate centers. It is performed by the weight of 60% of the grade that students have from their school and the push they get from it to face this happy end of baccalaureate studies, which is the PAU. I don't say disparagingly tinglado, but rather I refer with the most expressive word to the immense tangle of activities, displacements, expenses, suffering of students and teachers, organization of the baccalaureate everywhere (which is no small feat), structure of the corresponding government department, formidable movement of people during three days full of unnecessary or very little determining exams that these tests entail every summer.About thirty years ago, when the so-called massification of the university had already been unleashed, a very small group managed a perfectly reasonable access system. Today, consulting the current Generalitat's organizational chart on the internet regarding the matter makes one's skin crawl, in addition to intensely provoking fear of the labyrinth. It is proverbial that, even during the pandemic, students, with their accompanying professors and their families, were put at risk, making them unnecessarily comply with all six or seven exams scheduled for the sacred PAU 2021 in packed classrooms during the corresponding hours.
It would not cost much to study together with schools a common language in terms, not of the center's grades, since each center must be as original and independent as it feels capable of defending, but of grades for the university. Universities would also provide some criteria, some small interview, perhaps. And each student would have their safe-conduct and information to choose undergraduate studies to their liking, within a framework of aspirations that do not have a true meaning until one really enters university studies. The enormous displacement of lands that the PAU skyscraper has become, far from proper university life, would not be necessary. Useless suffering and unnecessary work should be prohibited. Let the centers provide their information in an intelligible way for the universities. They are the ones who know the talent and qualities of their students. This is enough and it is not very different from what already happens despite the tremendous hurdle of the PAU at the end of it all.These useless exams have imposed themselves on our lives. An almost comical monster. In short: the PAU are nothing but an example of social and political conformity with bureaucracy, based as always on the absurdity of a mistaken, hypertrophied cause, and a great, scandalous laziness in seriously thinking about the mission of the university. I will say it out of personal vice: a voluntary servitude of the people and a passive obedience of those responsible to the false tranquility they usually pursue. They don't complain, so let's not complicate things... How could we imagine access to higher education, as it was called before, with success and sans larme? Perhaps it is worth asking ourselves again in favor of the health of a system that would have enough with a couple of entrance doors to each university and that, on the other hand, divides students from the first day towards the hundreds of private doors of hundreds of degree programs, and forces them to decide prematurely, when they still have a long way to go to know universities from the inside, what their professional life path will be. Considering how knowledge moves in the present they have found themselves in, this is not the least of the foolishness that explains the monstrous nature of the PAU that we have allowed to grow badly for far too long.
