University directors debate changes to Chilean education

Universidad de Chile

The Council of University Directors met last Thursday to reevaluate how students are tested and universities are funded.

The Council of University Directors of Chile (Cruch) met in Punta Arenas to discuss higher education reform. The main topic of discussion was revising the PSU, the entrance exam to Chile’s traditional universities, which in the past has favored students of private high schools.

Cruch represents twenty five public or government-subsidized universities including Universidad de Chile and Universidad Católica, the two largest and most prestigious institutions in the country. It meets monthly to review formal education policies.
Last year, international education company Pearson investigated the PSU and found several flaws, including an apparent socioeconomic biases.

The PSU is a standardized multiple choice test made up of four different subjects. Students are required to take the mathematics and language arts sections and then choose between the science or social science sections. The Pearson review found that students from private, urban schools scored significantly higher than public school students on the mathematics and science sections.

To rectify this, Cruch decided to modify the science section into three separate pieces: biology, chemistry and physics. Pearson’s investigation concluded that technical secondary schools scored above average on physics-related science questions, but below-average in chemistry and biology. In theory, dividing the science segment into the appropriate sub-sections would allow students that specialize in certain sciences higher scores.
Other changes to the PSU include getting rid of a quarter point penalty for wrong answers.

“There isn’t really a technical reason to have this,” said Juan Zolezzi, vice-president of Cruch and dean of Universidad de Santiago, in regards to the penalty point.

Pearson noted that penalty points only encouraged students to skip questions instead of thinking through problems, which he described as the “opposite of education.”

Also on the agenda was the reevaluation of the Indirect Fiscal Support (AFI) program. The AFI awards money to Cruch universities based on the top 28,000 scores in the language and mathematics sections of the PSU of the previous year. Universities receive an awards package directly portional to the percentage of their students with PSU scores among the top 28,000.

Critics of the AFI say the program has a number of faults. First, there has been a dramatic increase of students accepted into universities, so the endowment should no longer be based on the top 28,000 scores. Since 2009 Universidad de Chile and Universidad Católica have won more than 40 percent of AFI’s US$50 million budget.

Another criticism of the AFI is that it creates bias. Studies done by both the Ministry of Education and the education think tank Educación 2020 show that universities now accept students based primarily on PSU scores.

“Universities are only encouraged to find the best PSU scores. There is no incentive to find necessarily the best students,” Carlos Figueroa, a political analyst at Educación 2020 told.