Vestibular exam

Vestibular is the primary and widespread system used by brazilian universities to select their students.

It consist in a writting, paper-based test, fully acessible to any student who have sucessfull achived high school grade, even undergraduated studentes at that leves are allowed do aplly as treineiros. Such tests are desinged by each university, and it could have multiple choice questions, open-write questions and - almost ever - a compostion on a given essay.

Altough tests must be done by all students on same days and times, they're usually split in two phases. The first one brings multiple choice questions wich answers are singed in a optical-reading card. Then the best scored candidates are selected to the second phase, when they do more extensive, discussion-like questions and composition. The discussion-style questions and compositions are corrected by university professors, anonimously. The best scored students take the places.

In a different way of the usual pratice in american colleges, brazilian undergraduate college programs are kinf of stricted and well defined since the moment of enrollment. University candidates must choose their major by the time they aplly to vestibular, and they cannot change their options except by internal university transfferer, wich it's a difficult way too.

Throughout last decades, specially in public universities, there's always been a gap between the anual enrollment places offerred and the high and growing demand for high-quality and fee-free public universities. In a way to assure that the selected students were not picked up due to staff friendship nor influent people recommendation, vestibular was implanted, by law, as the only authorized admission method until 1996, when the new Education Law was published. The dispute soars as high as 100 to 140 candidates/vacancy for most desired course, as top medicine colleges.

Pros and Cons

Opinios vary a lot about vestibular system in Brazil. As there are very few fraud inccidents in major universities tests, vestibular is a fair and unpessoal system that grants every teenager the same opportunity to get a place in top public universities that are, as cited above, free of any tuiton, fee or charge for their undergraduate programs. The only selection criteria is the knowledgment of a wide content of the basic education program, wich is nationally unified; meaning that universities are picking up the studentes wich best acamedic performance regardless of wealthy, ethnic background, region of origin, staff friendship or political influence. Meritocracy is appraised at most, and it's the most important value in a university.

Some criticism emerge as vestibular would have been standartizing the content of basic education in both private and public high schools in Brazil, as parents would not choose schools that are not aligned with test contents. There is also a concern that place all chances of a teenager on a single test could be unfair (despite the fact candidates are completelly free to aplly to as many vestibular's as they want, as many times as they want in one or more university if they fails). As students from wealthier families usually gets more competitive conditions along their basic education - and so they takes the most of the seats of public universities -, the government is accused of divert escasse resources from basic education for poor people to wealthier young undergraduate courses.