A spelling test for aspiring Spanish police officers has given rise to controversy due to its difficulty. The test, given to candidates to join the Spanish National Police (CNP) consisted of answering sí or no, in just eight minutes, on whether 100 words in Spanish were spelled correctly.
The avalanche of complaints forced the General Directorate of Police to lower the bar and accept a mark of 3.5 out of 10 as a pass, instead of the usual 5. Despite the adjustment, however, only a quarter of the candidates managed to pass the exam, according to digital newspaper Vozpopuli, which indicates that only 3,956 of the 16,255 who sat the test reached the minimum of 3.5.
Thus, according to the newspaper, the examination board for the National Police gave a fail in spelling to 75% of those seeking to win a place at the basic level for the selection process in course. Specifically, only 24.33% of those examined passed.
Unlike what happened in the 2020 exams, the court had expressly reserved the right to lower the cut-off mark in the test in which spelling ability is assessed, in the event that there was not “a sufficient number of candidates" with a score of at least 5, in order to ensure "effective selection". The minimum score set in the spelling test last year was 6.20.
Wave of protests
The difficulty of the examination led to a wave of protests, which led the SUP police union to complain to the police body's training division about the organization of the entrance tests, asserting that it was not objective. The union compared the test to the Pasapalabra television quiz show. He also denounced the "degrading conditions" for candidates at some of the facilities in tests affected by Covid-19 protocols.
The union quoted language experts to support its claim that the exam “does not serve to determine the spelling knowledge of the aspirants, and thus, far from being an objective test of knowledge, it seems to be based on the need to easy sifting-out and selection".
Main image: Only one in four aspiring police officers has passed the spelling test / ACN