What was anticipated as a routine exam day has transformed into a scenario of widespread frustration, tears, and protests outside the university campuses in Bizkaia. The Mathematics exam for the University Entrance Exam (PAU) has caused a significant upheaval among students. They universally agree it was the "most competency-based exam" they have ever faced, a format for which they claim their schools did not adequately prepare them. "People who are fighting to get into a high-demand degree program have left crying," explained one of the students who took the test.
The primary source of indignation stems from a drastic shift in the problem-solving approach. Students criticize that, unlike in previous years, this exam featured lengthy questions and a substantial demand for reading comprehension. Controversy erupted with the inclusion of scientific contexts entirely unrelated to the subject itself, with students reporting the use of physics statistics and constants like the speed of light within the mathematics test. This interdisciplinary mix proved to be an insurmountable barrier, particularly for students pursuing health-related fields who have had minimal physics exposure in their academic careers.
The indicative models previously provided by the institutions did not reflect the actual level of complexity ultimately demanded in the exams. The situation escalated to the point where the final exercise was unanimously described as "impossible," forcing the vast majority of candidates to "leave the paper completely blank" due to their inability to solve it. The atmosphere within the classrooms mirrored this general helplessness, with numerous students looking around, blocked, and simply waiting for the allotted time to expire so they could leave.
The aftermath of the exam presented scenes of utter desolation, starkly contrasting with the relief experienced the previous day, when the Basque language exam had left students feeling positive and satisfied. Outside the examination centers in Bizkaia, students were seen shouting, crying, and calling their parents en masse, frustrated by the threat to their academic futures. Most striking is that this collapse is significantly impacting students with the best academic records, whose strong suit was mathematics, leading to fears that the obtained scores will prevent many aspirants from meeting the demanding cut-off grades for careers such as Medicine, Nursing, or Physics.
