More than 300,000 high school seniors will debut the new University Entrance Exam (PAU), the old selectivity exam, in a week. This year it is much more demanding because there will only be one exam model per subject and many more practical questions.
After five years with the 'pandemic model', where students could choose between two exam models and in many cases stop studying part of the syllabus, the young people of this course have it a little more difficult to achieve an ambitious cut-off mark.
Experts predict a drop in grades after the increase in the percentage of outstanding grades in the 2024 course, where communities such as Murcia or Extremadura reached almost 20%.
The latest statistics from the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities show that the average grade for access to a degree in the last nine years has risen by almost half a point, from 6.98 to 7.41.
On the other hand, the tightening of this new selectivity will impact admission to degrees, especially the most demanded ones, since the new high school graduates will compete in unequal conditions with respect to the students who passed the PAU in 2023 or 2024 and whose grade is still valid for them to be able to access the university.
Experts from the Funcas research center point out that the increase in cut-off marks has not only been influenced by the inflation of outstanding grades, but also by the difficulty of public universities to increase places in highly requested degrees, the creation of new careers with high grades and the greater offer of private universities.
The exams will be held in the majority of the communities on June 3, 4 and 5 in the ordinary call, although in Madrid and Guadalajara they will be on June 3, 4, 5 and 6, in the Canary Islands on June 4, 5, 6 and 7 and in Catalonia on June 11, 12 and 13. The extraordinary call for July varies greatly between autonomous regions.
Format of the exercises and penalty for errors
The duration of the exercises will be 90 minutes and each exam will contain between 20 and 25% of questions of a competence nature, that is, more practical. The questions may be with closed, open or semi-constructed answers.
The qualification of a subject in the general phase (formed by the compulsory subjects of Language and Literature II, Foreign Language II, the compulsory specific subject of the modality studied and History of Spain or Philosophy and co-official language) must be equal to or greater than 5 to be valid and be computed. The grades of the admission phase will be valid for 3 academic years.
The maximum penalty for spelling mistakes will be 2 points for Language and Literature II and co-official languages; 1.5 points for the foreign language exam, and 1 point for the rest of the subjects. However, it is not the same in all Autonomous Communities.
In the case of Language and Literature, in most autonomous regions, mistakes will start to be counted from the second one, deducting a quarter of a point (0.25) for each one, and in the rest of the subjects the penalty will start to be counted from the third spelling mistake and will be 0.10. However, in the Basque Country, 0.10 points will be deducted for each spelling mistake from the beginning.
The use of calculators that are not programmable is allowed and the loan of calculators between students will not be allowed. Errors made in the calculation of a value in exams such as Mathematics, Physics or Chemistry will not be taken into account in the qualification of subsequent developments if they are of equal complexity, but errors in elementary operations will be penalized with a maximum of 0.25 points.
Also the score of the blocks varies according to communities; while in some the same block of questions can count 4 points, in others they score it with 3 or even with 5 points.
