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ENGINEERING BULLETIN

Publisher: All-Russian public organization "Academy of Engineering Sciences named after A.M. Prokhorov".

In Brazil, More Universities Make Transition to Standardized Government Entrance Exam

05.11.2010

November 2, 2010
This coming weekend more than 4.5 million Brazilian students will take their university entrance exam. It is a rite of passage that is changing thanks to government efforts to streamline and standardize a once-disparate process.

The government's goal is to reduce costs for universities and students and expand access to the country's publicly financed, and best, universities.

But the reputation of the National High School Examination, known by its Portuguese language acronym Enem, was marred last year by a scandal involving a stolen copy of the exam, and the incident made a few university administrators wary of adopting it.

At the State University of Campinas, "we'd been speaking about changing our system and using the Enem for a while," says Renato Pedrosa, the coordinator of the Group for Studies in Higher Education at the university's Center for Advanced Studies. "But some people said, Let's wait and see how it goes first. And then when that happened people said, Well, look ..."

Until last year, most of the country's publicly financed universities formulated and held their own entrance exams, known as vestibulares. But now, almost all of them are using, either wholly or in part, the government's exam.

The standardized test was first held in 1998 and was designed to rate the performance of both students and high schools. It was revamped two years ago to make it more relevant to the high-school curriculum and to make it easier to compare school and student performance on a year-to-year basis, according to the National Institute for Educational Studies and Research. known as Inep, the government body responsible for all nationwide testing.

Full text of the article - on The Chronicle website
Photo: The Chronicle

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