And so it begins...

The grades for the first part of the exam for the specialty of Physical Education have been posted, and the words I keep hearing to describe the results are "massacre" and "butchery." It appears that there is a pass rate of about 5% (which still leaves about 200 candidates to compete for 25 spots in the second round (I don't know the exact numbers, but somewhere in that neighborhood.)

Among other issues: Some questions were given more weight than others, some questions allow for partial credit and some don't, and none of this information was made available to candidates (they still haven't made public the scoring rubric, and probably won't.)

Another reason why so many people failed is that in the essay portions of the test, apparently, a spelling mistake cost 1 point and errors due to accents cost half a point (and full credit on the exam is 10 points.) For the English teachers, all the essays were in English (apart from the short-answer questions in the first exam.) I don't know if they have the same grading criteria in English, as spelling mistakes in a foreign language for this type of exam are not only very likely to be quite frequent, but also not as relevant (I imagine that spelling errors are more likely to occur in theoretical/academic language, not words that we are likely to be teaching and correcting in our students' writing.) Of course grammatical errors in English are probably much more frequent than in the Spanish essays, and also grammar is more important for teaching/learning English than the possible misspelling of a few words. So they may have different criteria (which again, probably will never see the light except as leaked by jury members.)

I assume they are equally interested in eliminating candidates for English, so I'm sure they will think of some way to make sure as few pass as possible (if it's handwriting, or use of whiteout, I may as well hang it in right now.)

The grades for the English part will be coming out probably mid-February, so I will have to wait until then to see if I passed or not. If they do have another exam in the future (maybe 2013, but nothing is certain) it will be with 60 topics instead of 25 and probably far fewer spots to compete for.

So, that's the latest news on the exam front...