Starting in June 2025, the university entrance exams will be different. And the Governing Council has approved the new selectivity proposed since 2022, which was postponed and changed several times.

The aim of the new rule is to adapt the university entrance test to the latest educational reform, known as LOMLOE or the Celaá Law.

The new PAU is "lighter, more modern and adapted to society with the highest academic rigor and guaranteeing equal opportunities for all Spanish students", says Diana Morant, Minister of Science, Innovation and Universities.
Do you want to know some of the main changes of the new selectivity? We will tell you about them below.

It will be called EvAU or EBAU PAU

Selectivity will no longer be called the High School Entrance Assessment (EvAU or EBAU) and will return to the name it had a decade ago: the University Entrance Test (PAU).

The Official State Gazette has already published Royal Decree 534/2024 of June 11, which regulates the conditions for access to official undergraduate university studies, the basic characteristics of the entrance test and the basic regulations of the admission procedure. And in this new rule, the name of the selectivity we had until now no longer appears.

There will be common correction criteria in the PAU

The new regulation explains that there will be common criteria and objectives for correction and grading so that there will be no differences when the corrections and examiners of all the autonomous communities correct these guidelines.

Then there will be a grading guide for each exercise, which will include: "correction and grading criteria; specific to students with specific educational support needs; the weighting of each question; as well as the assessment tools used, if deemed necessary, provided by the students to objectively assess their answers," explains the royal decree.

In this regard, the Minister of Education, Vocational Training and Sports Pilar Alegría has stated that "it is the first time that common and homogeneous criteria are included in all territories".

The exercises will be more competitive and realistic

The exercises will have a competence-based design, which will prevent students from having to systematically memorize the content to answer.

This will allow students to "enable creativity and critical thinking, reflection and maturity in writing through a series of questions or tasks appropriate to the specific skills assessed," the royal decree explains.

Similarly, the questions or tasks of each exam will be based on contexts close to the students' lives and real artistic, scientific, humanistic and technological environments.

Open and semi-open questions will carry a higher score

The PAU exercises will be structured in different sections, and at the same time, there will be questions that require open or developing answers, semi-open or short answers, and closed or multiple-choice answers.

However, answers to open-ended and semi-open-ended questions or tasks will have a score of at least 70% of the exercise, where before the new standard the score assigned to this type of question was at least 50%.

More spelling and grammar will be considered

The coherence, cohesion, grammar, vocabulary and spelling of the students' answers, as well as the presentation, "will be at least 10% in all questions or tasks that involve writing a text", as announced by the Ministry of Education, VET and Sports (MEFPD) in a statement.

Second foreign language, compulsory when studying 4 subjects of the specific phase

Those who want to improve their acceptance grade, and those who opt for 14 points, can take a maximum of 4 subjects in the voluntary or specific phase of the PAU, as long as they are not the same as those evaluated in the general phase.

Now, if you want to take the maximum number of subjects in the specific phase (4), "one of them must necessarily be a second foreign language", the MEFPD explained in a statement.

What is left of the 2024 selection?

In the general phase, students will be examined in 4 subjects:
z Language and Literature II.

z Foreign Language II.

z Specific compulsory subject of the modality studied.

z History of Spain or History of Philosophy.

In the autonomous communities with more than one official language, students will have to take the Official Language and Literature II exam, and therefore they will take 5 exams in the general phase of the test.

z Each test will last 90 minutes, with a 30-minute break if there are consecutive exams.

z Test grade exam us, It will continue to be calculated using the arithmetic mean of the scores. And the grade to enter the university is obtained by adding the average grade of the High School (with a weight of 60%) to the grade obtained at the PAU (40%).

If you want to learn more about the new selectivity, you can consult the Royal Decree.

Chronicle of a new selectivity announced

In order to approve the royal decree on the new selectivity, its text had to make several changes:

z In the summer of 2022, MEFPD announced that the new test would be fully implemented in the 2026-2027 school year.

z However, at the end of that year it decided to postpone the full implementation until the 2027-2028 school year, and announced that the changes would be made progressively from the 2023-2024 school year.

z In February 2023, the draft royal decree of the new selectivity was released, with some changes compared to the initial proposal.

z In September 2023, the Government finally announced that there would be no change in selectivity for this 2023-2024 school year.

z On June 11, 2024, the Council of Ministers approved the new rule that will apply to the 2025 selection process.