The most complex work is related to assessing students; it gets very complicated, I mean teachers have different criteria, we all do. I’m obsessive about teacher training, I mean sometimes our teachers have been indoctrinated in a certain way, mostly in secondary school, and sometimes this goes counter to what curriculum designs say about formative assessment, about working across areas, in a collaborative way. I mean, it’s a very very difficult thing that has often forced us to make compromises that perhaps have not been ideal but have been the ones we could make.
So that’s what allowed us to move forward, but it’s a pending matter and we had to adapt it to the new regulations that were introduced: numerical marks are no longer numerical marks; I mean, the requisites to pass a year have also changed, student retention in secondary school as we used to know it became promoción acompañada (i.e. passing a year while continuing to do extra remedial work under a teacher’s supervision); numerical marks are only given to 6th-year students when they finish the school year. For instance, now the 6th-year students are still scored as TEA (advanced learning trajectory) or TED (irregular learning trajectory), and they only get a numerical mark at the end of the year when they finish the secondary level, because the numerical mark is necessary for the diploma. So this has made waves in secondary school, because— Also, 5th-year and 6th-year students, especially the upper secondary students and families, used to have the old academic scheme internalized, there was a specific test, and nowadays all of that has changed.