RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Just over 3 million students registered to take the annual exam, a 44% drop from last year’s number and the lowest number since 2006. Scores on the strenuous five and a half hour exam, which is taken over two weekends, is used as the main admissions criteria for most Brazilian universities.
Experts said they expected many of this year’s registrants to be absent on Sunday. About half of the 5.7 million who registered for last year’s exam failed to turn up when it was finally held amid the pandemic.
Lengthy school closures and frustration with distance learning affected millions of students across the country.
“It is possible that given the disruption to in-person learning, there is a feeling that there wasn’t enough time to prepare for exams,” said Claudia Costin, director of the Center for Excellence and Innovation in Educational Policies, a research center in Rio de Janeiro. She also noted that the pandemic led to economic hardship, forcing many to work rather than study.
Low attendance was clear in some parts of Rio de Janeiro on Sunday. Large numbers of parents typically gather outside while their children take the test, but there were only a few street vendors offering pens and masks in the vicinity of the Catholic University shortly before the exam began.
Conservative President Jair Bolsonaro has made the examination part of his cultural battle against the left. He has accused those designing it of lending it a leftist slant. He has challenged its usefulness in determining who can enter college, a stance often linked to leftist critics of exams in the United States.
“Look at the ENEM (National High School Examination) pattern,” the President said last week during a visit to Qatar. “For God’s sake, does that actually test any knowledge? Or is it part of political activism and behavioral issues?”
Critics say Bolsonaro’s government has intervened to change exam questions that displeased the President. In one instance, they point out, he restructured a reference to the 1964 military coup to call it a “revolution,” according to supporters.
Thirty-seven members of the agency drafting the test, the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research (INEP), resigned this week, complaining that the government was seeking to interfere in the tests to incorporate ideology.
The main union representing the institute’s workers called Friday for an investigation into alleged attempts at censorship.
“Since Bolsonaro was elected, INEP employees have been treated as communists, that they are politically driven. And the institute’s management does not want to respect technical opinions when it comes to drawing up exams,” said the union’s chairman Alexandre Retamal.
A former Rio de Janeiro education secretary herself, Costin cautioned that a growing distrust of the exam could lead even more people to refrain from taking it in the coming years.
She said that right-wing governmental officials believe there are conspiracies in the making, which “leads the government to consider universities as political centers, and not as places of research and knowledge production.”