There are many differences between being a student in Brazil and out there, especially in the United States. As a kid who studied both curriculums, Brazilian and American, I had to acknowledge that and I always would catch myself thinking about what it means. Although many things in our systems are different –such as the subjects we take, what we are taught and the presence of extracurriculars as a school initiative– to fulfill our countries necessities, the part that would haunt me the most was always the college admission issue.
If you’re American, you know how things roll up there. To get into your first-choice college, you usually need to have more than good grades. Yes, of course, SAT grades are taken into account, and so is your GPA; but top-notch schools also consider the applicant’s extracurricular activities, recommendation letters and the ever-so-famous admission essays. To get into a good college, your curriculum as a whole must be strong. Another important thing is that colleges don’t require students to declare their majors immediately, so the students have mostly a year to decide what they wanna major on. And, of course, you need to be able to pay for it.
Although I think the American system is flawed – and you just have to look at legacy programs and their problems to have an idea of exactly how flawed –, I do wish the Brazilian one was more like it.
Here in Brazil, things go in another direction. We do have an standardized test that slightly resembles the American SAT, Enem, but that’s where it stops. Enem, which stands for Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio (or, in English, High School National Exam), is the main way to get into college. It consists on a two-day exam, with 180 five-option questions divided equally between the main four areas in Brazilian curriculum –Mathematics, Natural Science, Human Sciences and Languages And Codes– and an argumentative essay about a social topic that you only get to know when taking the exam. When the exam is corrected, you are evaluated in zero to a thousand points for the essay and 200 to an indefinite amount (though the highest scores don’t usually go over a thousand). Once those grades are added, you have your final and official score. Next step to signing in is finding the college you want –major included, you can only apply if you have chosen a major– and putting your grade on ProUni, SiSU or FIES. Those government programs are affiliated to most universities in Brazil, and certainly all the best ones (such as São Paulo University, USP, a public college that accepts Enem and another standardized test named Fuvest and is praised to be one of the bests, along with UFRJ, in the entire country), and they are the ones who tell if you have enough points to get into the major you want or not. Some smaller or private universities have other ways in, but they are all standardized tests too, and, usually, those who accept Enem are the better colleges – the public ones.
While Enem makes it possible for more people to get into college, since it’s nation-wide and people everywhere can take it (unlike the old entrance tests), it has one major flaw that cannot go ignored: it’s a standardized test.
The problem about having a standardized test as the way to get into college is that a test like Enem, Fuvest or even the American SAT could never tell all a student is. Here in Brazil, we work and study our whole lives hoping to get a nice score on Enem, but that score is flawed to show whether we are able, whether we have learned something, or not. How could a three digit number extracted from one single essay and answers to five-option questions ever picture your effort as a student, how participative you were throughout your student life in classes or how much school has actually taught you? The thing is, it could never. I, as a high school student who will probably be taking Enem in a year and a half, am particularly scared; because although my teachers and colleagues call me a ‘straight A student’, I’m not the best at five-option questions, and I much rather answering written, complete answers, which picture my knowledge much more accurately. I have dedicated my whole life to my studies, yet, I might fail on getting into my dream university.
And this, of course, leads to a much bigger problem: the anxiety, the pressure, involved in Enem. We are raised to think that getting a good grade in there is all that matters and that whether we pass or not will decide the rest of our lives, and, in exchange, it ruins our mental health. Take as example the results from 2016’s exam, which are coming out today, Jan. 18, except the website has even crashed. Seven million Brazilian teenagers are anxiously trying to get their grades, to see if they will be able to go on to a major, and the system has one more time failed us. If Enem is going to be such a big deal on our lives today, it has to step its game up, and it has to be quick; especially because a big percentage of those 7 million teenagers won’t get good news (if any) just because, instead of taking in account their real potential and talent, all it does is calculate how much all the gaps he filled in on the answer sheet are worth.
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