Selectividad

17 May 2012

During my language exchange in the last several weeks, we've been comparing the Spanish and American university systems. One of the topics that has come up in these sessions (as well as one I've heard about from parents at school) has been Selectividad. Selectividad is the Spanish version of the ACT or SAT, and the test date is fast approaching.

Selectividad is taken by students who have finished instituto (high school) and plan to attend university. It consists of six 90 minute tests which are taken over the course of three days in either June or September. I remember taking the ACT and the SAT, and I thought those were bad! But Selectividad is almost three times as long!

The test consists of two parts. The first part is required of all students who take Selectividad and it tests all subjects covered in school--such as Spanish, English (or the foreign language that they took in instituto), history, Valencian/Basque/Galician (depending on the region), and whatever subject you want to specialize in. The second part (and non-compulsory) allows you to choose 2 to 4 specific subject tests. These tests can help students to increase their final score.

Before, students were graded on a scale of 1 to 10--as is common in the Spanish schooling system. The final score was the average of all of the tests combined. Now, scores are weighted depending on what the student plans to study at university.

I don't know much about the exam itself, but I've been looking at old English tests.

The English part of the exam is completely focused on reading and writing. The first part of the exam is reading comprehension. Students must answer some multiple choice questions, short answer, and true and false questions about the text that they are given. Then, they write a short response of 100-150 words about topics related to the text.

From what I've heard, the test can be a bit tricky because the texts that are chosen are a little random. I've read a few of the texts used in previous years and I found that the texts use language that is a little awkward. It's all technically correct (and from native English sources) but would be more challenging for a non-native speaker.

Such as the following quote: "I'd say myself that Glasgow is a crazy football city; there aren't many Glaswegians who don't support one or other of our two big professional teams, Rangers or Celtic. And the football results in the evening papers are a lot more important to many people that what's happening in the rest of the world.... Well, when the two clubs were founded they both had religious connections, which probably sounds a funny thing for football."