The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) has been sent fresh evidence on petition 13.575 that alleges unfair discrimination against some 40% of secondary school students that sit for Chile’s national admission test for university, the Prueba de Selección Universitaria or PSU. 

The case’s plaintiff is Carol Venegas, a 2012 student leader, and is being conducted by a team of Chilean lawyers led by Rodrigo Mora. Venegas is asking the commission to seek a ‘friendly’ agreement with the Chilean government on, among other things, changing the PSU and the passing of laws in the country that penalise test abuse.

In Chile, admission to all public universities and many of the best private ones, 36 in all, is based on a combination of PSU scores, high school grades and student ranking. Last year 295,000 students sat the test and registration is now open for this year’s test on 26 and 27 November.

Hornet’s nest

A hornet’s nest awaits IACHR experts seeking agreement on a PSU reform as the academic teams who design and carry out the test are bitterly divided. 

One side calls the test unfair arguing that it is biased towards scientific humanistic curricula, thus disadvantaging roughly 40% of high school students coming from the technical professional track that does not include the scientific humanistic subjects on which the PSU is based. 

This group, campaigning for a substantial reform of the PSU, is led by DEMRE, a University of Chile department in charge of the national university admission test. 

The DEMRE group is looking at bringing back some of the elements of the Academic Aptitude Test or PAA – a reasoning test along the lines of SAT, the standardised test widely used for college admissions in the United States. The Chilean PAA was replaced by the PSU in 2003.

This group refers back to the 2013 Pearson report, from the US education consultancy, an 800-page evaluation of the PSU. The Pearson report questions the PSU’s capacity to predict students’ performance in their first year at university and points to its unfairness towards technical-professional secondary school students, who mostly come from poor families.

Pearson recommends developing a framework that describes aptitudes (abilities) and relevant non-cognitive variables (for example, study skills and motivation).

A competing group is resisting major changes to the PSU. A prominent institution in this group is the Sole Admission System (or SUA, according to its Spanish acronym), that advises university rectors on PSU matters.

In October 2017, SUA launched a study that it is using as a weapon against substantial changes to the PSU. The study shows that the correlation between PSU scores and first-year university marks had improved slightly since 2013, especially in mathematics, thus disproving a key criticism of the PSU: that it is bad at predicting student performance in the first year.

The long haul

Criticisms of the PSU and proposed solutions come and go but no reform of the PSU has been approved as yet. 

A DEMRE 2017 restricted report maintains that the changes suggested by Pearson have not been implemented because of the opposition of a technical advisory committee (CTA, according to its Spanish acronym) of the Council of Rectors of Chilean Universities (CRUCH), which owns the PSU. 

On 30 November 2017, CRUCH appointed a new five-member Technical Committee, among names put forward by universities whose mission it is to study the PSU and propose changes. There was a big fight over who should make up the Technical Committee. 

The contrasting views of those elected to CRUCH’s Technical Committee augur badly for a swift resolution of the dispute over how best to select students applying for Chilean universities. 

Nine months have already elapsed since the Technical Committee was appointed and nothing has been heard from it so far. 

Jorge Manzi, director of the Pontifical Catholic University’s Measurement Centre, Mide UC, and one of the authors of the PSU, a psychologist reviled by those seeking a major revamp of Chile’s national admission test, told La Tercera daily newspaper in an interview on 1 December 2017 that he was fully convinced that primary and secondary education have to be as equitable as possible, with the same learning opportunities open to all.

This is certainly not the case in Chile where only the wealthiest families can afford the best schools. The disparity between graduates from reputed private schools and municipal and public ones shows up in PSU scores year after year. 

Referring to this income disparity and its impact on education, Manzi asked the La Tercera reporter: “Are you going to tell me that by changing the test we are going to solve the problems we have in Chile?”