Exam post-mortem

My, that sounds ominous, doesn't it? Well, the very short version is that it's over. I'm pretty sure I did well enough to pass on to the second phase (which I won't know for sure until February), but it remains to be seen whether I did well enough to get a teaching post.

So here's a post-mortem of the exam, in excrutiating detail, part by part:

Part 1, the mystery exam.
A lot of people were afraid that this was going to be super difficult as a way of eliminating as many people as possible before the next round. I admit, the thought crossed my mind as well, given the circumstances. And a lot of people studied the wrong things (as in, they studied the curriculum itself and all of the accompanying information in the legislation, rather than the contents of the curriculum.) But no. It was, in fact, a fairly straightforward exam on the contents of Primary education, and truth be told, it was a fairly low level of content. However, it was very long, and I didn't finish all of the questions, so that is a strike against me.
It is hard to estimate how many questions I didn't answer or may have gotten wrong, but the minimum to pass on to the next phase is a 25%, and I do think that I probably answered correctly at least 60%.

Oh, first of all, it was in Spanish, which is only logical; however, there had been conflicting information in the exam announcement and it was not clear that logic would in fact prevail. (In one part the announcement, which is legally binding, stated that those who were opting for a post as an English teacher would do all the parts of the exam in English.)

It was not multiple choice. The questions followed different formats-- some were very brief, one-word answers, and others were longer or had multiple parts, and there was no indication of the relative worth of each question.

The text and Language Arts part was first. There was a text from Pio Baroja, a Spanish author of the Generation of 98. But it wasn't really a text-- it was a few different excerpts from a memoir of his childhood, and they weren't particularly connected to each other. The first question was to write a summary, in ten lines or less, of the text. However, since it wasn't actually a unified text, there wasn't exactly an overall theme to sum up, which gave me pause, as if I were missing something. But no, I don't think so, so to give a basic summary of a text like that is a pretty poor indication of anything other than whether or not you understood the various parts, and frankly, I'm sure that everyone taking the exam couyld do that.

There was also a question that asked for definitions of three words from the text: escrúpulo, pronóstico, and something else. The words were clearly understandable in context, in the fairly unlikely event that the test taker didn't already know them, but I wanted to double-check to make sure that the word hadn't been used in another context, which involved several re-readings to locate the words and the resulting waste of time.

A question that asked for a definition of the word "basta" in "me basta con", which is yet again a question on the level of a Primary student and not an educated professional. Later they asked for definitions of the adjectives "basta" and "vasta" to determine whether we know how to spell (b and v sound alike in Spanish and are a common source of spelling errors.) Further confirming my sense that this test was taken from an already-existing bank of questions meant for the external exams in Primary school. Which is incredibly insulting (wait til I get to the Math section!)

However, since the test was so long, and since I spent so much time on the text and language questions instead of starting with the math, which were at the end, I didn't finish. So one could say, I suppose, that it was an acceptable test because the people who really knew their stuff would have time to do it all well (and I'm sure there are many who did) and the people who hesitated or got bogged down would not finish (and of course there are people, though probably not many, who didn't know the answers.) When we get to the next section I will expose my own ignorance on questions that most Spanish adults probably know...

There were some questions about parts of speech and analyzing verb forms. This last question I wasn't entirely sure exactly what they were asking for-- I put down tense, mood (only for the one in subjunctive-- oops!) person, singular or plural, and maybe something else, but I may not have been complete enough. And a few more questions that maybe some people wouldn't know, like the fact that "pero" is a conjunción adversativa, or stuff like that. But nothing out of the ordinary.

Not one single question about history. Oh, the hours I spent studying Spanish history, all for naught.

Very little about Science. Ditto. But I will discuss the rest later, because Elías is reaching his breaking point as far as waiting for the computer...