One weekend of testing decides where millions of Brazilian school-leavers will spend the next several years. A single score from the Enem is what most public universities in Brazil now use to fill their places. A student sits four sections of 45 multiple-choice questions and writes one essay. That result becomes their application to as many as 115 institutions at once.
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What the exam replaced
Before the Enem took over, most publicly financed universities ran their own entrance exam, known as the vestibular. Each one set its own dates, fees and format, so a student who wanted to apply to two universities that scheduled their exams on the same day simply could not sit both. Fees added up too. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the Enem cost 35 reais, about $21, against roughly 100 reais for a typical vestibular, and some students sat two or three of the older tests.
The Enem itself dates to 1998, when it was built to assess the quality of secondary education rather than to select university entrants. The government later revamped it to make it more relevant to the school curriculum. Renato Pedrosa, who coordinates higher education studies at the State University of Campinas, said hesitation about the switch faded once other universities had tested the new system.
How the score gets used
Since 2009, the Enem has largely displaced the vestibular as the route into public higher education. Brazil’s education ministry runs it through a unified system, called SISU, that matches scores against places at federal universities. Almost 6 million students sat the exam in the year Times Higher Education reported on it, competing for a much smaller number of federal places. Fernanda de Souza Monteiro, an official at Brazil’s national testing institute, said the shift multiplied the applicant pool. A university that once drew 20,000 applicants for its own exam could see close to five million once the Enem opened the door nationally.
Cost is meant to be less of a barrier than it was under the old system. Almost two-thirds of registered students were exempt from the exam fee, either because they attended state schools or came from low-income households. But the exemption does not close the gap on its own. Data from Brazil’s Educational Census showed that 10% of private-school students who registered failed to sit the exam, against 42% of state-school students. Paula Nascimento da Silva of the University of São Paulo linked the gap to how unprepared state schools leave students to attempt the test at all.
Why critics call it a bottleneck
Making the entrance exam the same everywhere was meant to make access more even. In practice, researchers found it has moved the competition rather than levelled it. A study from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul found that in 2012 only about 13% of undergraduates moved between states to study. Most of that movement came from students in Brazil’s three wealthiest states, São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas Gerais. The paper’s authors argued that poorer states still could not export their own students to the six wealthiest, while wealthier applicants kept taking the places instead.
Antonio Freitas, pro-rector of the Getulio Vargas Foundation, put the limit on what a single test can fix plainly. It “can’t perform magic,” he said. He argued its real value is diagnostic: it shows which schools are underperforming, rather than fixing twelve years of uneven schooling. Not every institution has bought in either. Two major public universities in São Paulo state, Unicamp and the University of São Paulo, kept their own entrance exams rather than adopt the Enem outright. Both cited timing: the Enem’s results come too late for them to run a second selection round.
The test’s content has also made it a target beyond education policy. An essay question on violence against women, and a human sciences question quoting the feminist philosopher Simone de Beauvoir, drew accusations of political indoctrination from members of Brazil’s congress the year Times Higher Education covered the row. The row even divided the Brazilian government. It became an argument over what one national test should be allowed to ask nearly 6 million teenagers to answer.
