Almost half of the teacher aspirants have failed the aptitude test

BarcelonaThe aptitude test scores for aspiring teachers (PAP) are falling again. Only 54.5% of the students who applied this year to access a university degree in early childhood or primary education have passed. That is, almost half of the applicants (45.5%) have failed the test, which since last year is once again mandatory in all universities –public and private– to graduate with a degree that allows one to be a teacher. The figure is 4 points lower than last year's edition, when 58% of applicants passed the exams. In fact, this will be the fourth consecutive year that the proportion of those who pass this test does not reach 60%.

Regarding the access routes, 57.81% of students coming from high school have passed the test, while among students coming from vocational training cycles (FP), only three out of ten (34.42%) have passed.

Students who have passed the PAP will now have to take the university entrance exams (PAU), which will be held on June 9, 10, and 11, and obtain the grade they need to access the degree they want. On the other hand, all students who have not passed the ordinary PAP exam session will be able to try again in the extraordinary exam on July 17 to try to enter an education degree in the university pre-registration in September.

Mathematics, the most concerning point

The PAP consist of two exams, one on communicative competence and critical reasoning, and another on mathematical-logical competence. The qualification for these tests is "pass" or "fail", and once passed, the test has indefinite validity. On the other hand, beyond the general results, the most worrying situation is found in the mathematics exam.

According to data from the Department of Research and Universities, consulted by ARA, this year more than half of the applicants (52.15%) have failed the mathematical-logical test. The percentage of failures in mathematics has increased by 12 points compared to the proportion of failures last year (39.49%) in this area. With all this, 2026 has been the third year with the highest proportion of failures in mathematics since the PAP began a decade ago.

Problems, rule of threes, and area calculations

Among the twenty or so logic-mathematical questions and problems that participants in this year's PAP had to answer, there were exercises that could be solved by performing two rule of threes or a multiplication, as well as more complex problems requiring calculations of volumes and areas or probabilities.

Additionally, among the test questions, there are a dozen exercises with open-ended answers that require a written justification of the proposed solution. You can consult the logic-mathematics competence test of the PAP of 2026 and its corrections here: Exam / Correction35% fail the communicative test

Regarding the other half of the test, the one on communicative competence and critical reasoning, the proportion of applicants who do not pass it is much lower: this year 35.31% of students have not passed this part of the exam. In this case, the results improve compared to last year, when 41.3% failed this section of the PAPs. Even so, the pass rate for this 2026 is the fourth lowest since the start of the tests, in 2017.

Regarding the test —which is specified to be answered in Catalan—, it consists of three parts: reading comprehension, written expression, and reflection on written language. The reading comprehension part focuses on an adaptation of the text Criterio, by Ramon Folch, and the student, among other things, must answer what the difference is between the concepts of opinion and criterion.

In the written expression exercise, students had to write a review of a real program from a media outlet or social networks. They had to do so by elaborating "a critical and argumentative journalistic text, which can be published in a newspaper or a popular science magazine". Finally, in the section on reflection on language, applicants had to detect errors in general knowledge, spelling, vocabulary, morphology, syntax, punctuation, adequacy, coherence, or cohesion of a text titled Leer para leer.

Below you can consult the communicative competence and critical reasoning test of the 2026 PAPs and its corrections: Exam / Correction