On July 4 and 5, a winter university admission test was taken for the first time. This process was the last “transition” exam before the Higher Education Access Test (PAES) debuts at the end of this year.
Said test applied a new scale, which went from 100 to 1000 points, and not up to 850 as it happened with the extinct PSU and the previous versions of the PDT.
As reported The Mercury, in the exam there were 33 thousand registered, but only 28 thousand of these young people attended to take the Reading Comprehension and Mathematics tests. In comparison, those who surrendered it in 2021 were more than 235 thousand people.
In total, only 13 students -at the national level- reached the maximum score (1000 points), 12 did so in the Mathematics test and one in History and Social Sciences. Of them, 5 graduated from private schools, 4 from subsidized private schools and 4 from municipal schools.
Neither in the Reading Comprehension test nor in Science were maximum scores recorded. The best performances were 944 and 951 points, being achieved by only two students in each subject.
According to the undersecretary of Higher Education, Verónica Figueroa, this translates into an advantage, because “the current score represents the level of skills of the people who take the test. In contrast, the old scale reported on the position of the people with respect to the population with which they took the tests”.
Meanwhile, the head of the Pedro de Valdivia Pre-university Language Department, Gonzalo González, pointed out that “the population that took it is particular, it is not the same as the one that takes the test that is given in the summer, because all the students who are graduating in this promotion, which is usually where the highest number of national maximum scores are concentrated”.
“Whenever the students who graduate do not have the same level of performance as the promotion, they generally come with better grades, studies and training. The students who are taking the test for the second time it is because they had some difficulty that they are trying to avoid to be able to access the university”, he concluded.
