A philosopher featured for the first time in the University Entrance Exam

BarcelonaAfter decades of university entrance exams, in 2025, for the first time, a woman appeared on the philosophy exam. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum, with a reflection on the need to make education compulsory, was the protagonist of the philosophy test alongside René Descartes and his Metaphysical Meditations. Almost half of the students took the exam, unlike last year when less than a third chose it, and which some have criticized as "very easy."

The exercise containing Nussbaum's text asked the student to explain the meaning of the statement: "Education is an area where it is legitimate to relax the usual deference to freedom of choice: here, governments would be right to require that boys and girls attend school." This thought is more related to the need for all children to attend school than to the current problems surrounding what standards schools and institutes should follow when teaching.

Kitten videos on TikTok

Beyond the authors, the rest of the philosophy exercises were clearly more competency-based than in previous editions, prompting students to reflect on everyday issues. For example, in one of the activities, students had to analyze, from the perspective of two Western philosophical authors, a text explaining that if a twenty-year-old boy has enough money to avoid having to work and wants to spend his time watching "inconsequential kitten videos" on TikTok all day, "there is no moral impediment."

"Francoism has emerged, and we have been able to work on it well."

The other half of the 44,200 students taking the University Entrance Exams these days have opted to study history. "Francoism came up, and since it fell in the middle of the school year, we've had time to prepare well," explained Martina from the Mireia de Montgat High School. In fact, the two texts the students had to analyze in the first exercise were two excerpts from writings by General Emilio Mola in 1936.

One of them deals with instructions for carrying out a coup d'état, with statements like It will be taken into account that the action must be extremely violent in order to reduce the enemy, which is strong and well organized, as quickly as possible. In the second, however, it is explained how to justify having perpetrated a coup d'état by defending, for example, that the coup was to free the "Homeland from the chaos of anarchy."

Another of the exercises in the history test consisted of choosing between pretending that the student was a special envoy of a foreign newspaper to Barcelona during a 1977 demonstration demanding political autonomy or imagining that shortly before Franco's death, they and their friends must write a text. In both cases, the future university student had to write a text with the keywords given in the exam itself.

The fact that among the keywords in the second option there was public transport either neighborhood associations It seemed like a nod to the story of Manolo Vital and Torre Baró, which was again mediated with The 47. "Since they already told us a bit what we had to do, it seemed easy to me," Martina admitted, who, on the contrary, said that the multiple-choice part seemed "killer."

In this last part, which this year At most it could represent 30% of the grade and it has represented 25%, a dozen questions were asked about the Second Spanish Republic and the growth of Catalanism in Barcelona at the beginning of the 20th century.

'Hippies' playing in front of Moreneta

As for this Thursday's optional subjects, in the case of mathematics, and unlike in previous years, the students' first impressions were positive. "I don't know how I did, but it wasn't as terrible as I expected or as difficult as other years' models," acknowledged one of the students upon leaving the test. Among the exercises in this test were those to determine the total cost of the material needed to build the mainsail of a ship with a semi-parabolic shape, or to calculate the probability that a part in an iron and steel parts company will be defective.

In the Spanish literature test, unlike the language exams, the classics did reappear: Valle Inclan with Lights of Bohemia, the explanation of how Don Quixote creates the character of Dulcinea or fragments of Life is a dream, by Calderón de la Barca and by Fireflies, by Ana María Matute. Among the optional subjects, a text from the music analysis test also attracted attention, featuring an article from the magazine Serra d'Or that narrates the visit of the progressive rock group Gong to Montserrat. The text by Salvador Avià i Faure describes how "a handful of hippies"with "outlandish" hats they played "electric and complicated music" before the Moreneta.