High-stakes Testing, COVID-19, and Youth Futures in Colombia

• In Event: Post-COVID High-Stakes Exams in Comparative Perspective: Youth Experiences in Marginalized Secondary Schools in Colombia, India, and Malawi

Proposal

All Colombian youth attending the last year of secondary school must take a high-stakes test known as SABER 11 (commonly referred to as the “ICFES Exam” for the government agency that develops and administers the exam). The results of this exam can determine both whether and where students attend postsecondary education; ICFES estimates that over 70% of higher education institutions in Colombia use the test results in making admissions decisions (Mariño et al., 2021). School-wide performance on the test also influences public perceptions and the resources that public schools receive. As a result, the application of the exam causes a great deal of stress for students, teachers, and school leaders. Schools often devote significant time and resources preparing students to take the exam, sometimes starting as early as primary school (Carrillo et al., 2022).

With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting disruption to educational provision, the administration of the ICFES exam in 2020 was thrown into chaos. Facing uncertainty regarding whether, where, when, and how the SABER 11 exams would be administered, students, teachers, and school leaders scrambled to respond to changing instructions from education officials. In some cases, students were forced to travel across the city to take the exam, while in others, students missed the test entirely. Although this disruption in the test administration had a clear impact on students’ postsecondary prospects and futures, it is not clear what the long-term impact has been for students living in marginalized environments.

In this paper, we draw from the results of a multiple-year, qualitative study of students in two secondary schools located in marginalized environments—one urban and one rural—in the Colombian Department of Antioquia to understand how students, teachers, and school leaders perceived, prepared for, and performed on the ICFES test as the COVID-19 pandemic interrupted their schooling and clouded their postsecondary plans with uncertainty. We find that while the disruption of the ICFES administration affected nearly all students and schools, students in very marginalized environments experienced particularly difficult short- and longer-term impacts on their future plans. These results contribute to literature on the educational impacts of COVID-19 by exploring the interplay of the pandemic and high-stakes testing; additionally, our research adds to evidence that high-stakes testing regimes tend to further exacerbate existing inequalities in educational opportunities (e.g., Giersch, 2018).

Authors

• Thomas Luschei, Claremont Graduate University

• Yenny Chavarria, The University of Wisconsin-Madison

• Amanda Spiegelberg, Claremont Graduate University