University Admission Process in Chile

WHY WE DO NOT LIKE PSU.

As my partner said, the current admission process discriminates students because of their social classes. Moreover, it does not show the real knowledge they possess nor evaluates apropiate skills for each course.

Youngsters whose families have more resources do not do better at PSU because they are smarter than the ones from a lower social class. Inteligence, studying habits or even the effort they make, are equally distributed through society. It is knowledge what is not equally distributed. Learning implies having had access to it, counting with quality books and teachers and being in an enviroment where culture is important.

Therefore, what PSU does is to prevent poor students -who have abilities but did not have acces to knowledge-, from developping a professional course of high standards.

In addition, PSU does not accomplish its main task, which is selecting the more qualified students to go to traditional universities. Because it does not messures abilities, nor skills. Just training. The ones who are good at memorizing and trained themselves correctly can have a high score. There are schools (normally private schools) that dedicate exclusive time to prepare their students for this exam, leaving behind other important subjects.

This situation leads us to a third negative characteristic of our university admission process. In Chile exists the business of something similar to pre-colleges. Here, the ones who can afford these classes are taught the mechanism of PSU. And in concequence, they are the more prepared to take the exam than the ones who were not able to pay for extra lessons.

ALTERNATIVE ADMISSION PROCESSES.

One of the main achievements of last year’s strike in our university was the posibility of having an alternative admission process, apart from PSU. Senior year students from schools with low budget can be matriculated at University of Concepción with only de minimum PSU score this university requires (475 or 500) and having had at least a 5 in their high school grades average. There is a quota of 56 students in 49 courses. Medicine, Law, Astronomy, Sociology, Psicology, History Teaching, among others.

Another admission process in Chile is the pre-college system. It is found in several universities in the country. (de Santiago, Cardenal Silva Henríquez, Alberto Hurtado, Tecnológica Metropolitana, Metropolitana de Ciencias de la Educación y Católica del Norte)

In University of Santiago, this programme started in 2007 with the support of UNESCO (united nacions. Educational, scientific and cultural organization). This system allowes students with the best grade averages of low budget schools, be matriculated at this university. No PSU score required. After selecting the students, they take classes of Spanish, Maths and Cultural Management for five months. If the sudents attend all lessons, they get matriculated in college at the University of Santiago with a full scholarship. And afterwards, they are able to study a professional course at this university.

CONCLUSION

As we said before, our current university admission process helps to increase our social differences and discriminates students from low economic stratums. Thus, we realised the solutions we suggest will be useless unless there is a deep structural change in our educational system, and if we look further, a change in our society.
However, we hope these alternatives get massively increased in the near future. This way, the university access will be improved for the ones who really want to study regardless of their economic condition. So what we -common citizens students and teachers- must do, is get informed and communicate others about the problems that bother us. And take advantage of oportunities like last year's strike to accomplish our aims and demands.