School competition, MIM

“Very superficial controversies have been raised regarding the level of difficulty, based on very few questions. Adequate tests to select the best"

In relation to the controversy raised by some newspapers regarding the low level of difficulty of the questions in the competition for teachers, whose written tests took place between 11 and 19 March and saw the participation of 372.804 competitors registered for the procedure, intend to make some necessary clarifications.

First of all, the criticisms made are based exclusively on news reported by some school information sites which, in turn, published the content of a small number of questions (two or three) made known by some competitors at the end of the tests.

In this regard, please note that the written tests involved the administration of 50 multiple choice questions to each candidate, of a pedagogical, psycho-pedagogical, methodological-didactic nature and relating to the English language and IT knowledge. Since it was necessary to organize 13 rounds of exams (three for the nursery and primary school competition and ten for secondary school), a total of 650 questions were processed and tested.

The great superficiality of those who intended to judge the level of difficulty of the 650 questions based exclusively on knowledge of the content of two or three of these, perhaps not randomly chosen from among the simplest, is clearly evident.

Therefore, it is considered useful to publish, as an example, a battery of 50 questions proposed for the written test of nursery and primary school and a battery of 50 questions for the secondary school test. In both batteries there are questions of medium and high difficulty, together with others of low difficulty. This, as is intuitive, responds to an evaluation technique that allows the competitors to be distributed on a scale that differentiates their scores and allows the best to be selected. It is, among other things, a criterion used in all competitions.

Well, bearing in mind that the minimum score to pass the written test is established at 70 points, out of the 44.615 admitted to the oral exam for nursery and primary school, 61,19% (27.299 of those admitted) obtained a score between 70 and 81, while 4,13% (1.844 of those admitted) achieved a score between 91 and 96 and only 0,44% (196 of those admitted) achieved a score between 97 and 100. For secondary schools, out of the 197.894 admitted to the oral exams, 52,38% (103.652 of those admitted) reported a score between 70 and 81, 6,20% (12.267 of those admitted) a score between 91 and 96 and 0,65% (1.277 of those admitted) achieved a score of 97 to 100.

As regards the two sets of attached questions, we indicate, by way of example, some questions that can be considered of medium-high complexity, also based on the number of correct answers obtained:

For childhood and primary school