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The panel of experts convened by the Technical Committee on University Access agreed that, starting with the 2028 admissions process, the Grade Ranking will be replaced by a new mechanism that will assign the same score to students who occupy the same position within their school, regardless of their grade point average. The body is comprised of the Undersecretary of Higher Education, Víctor Orellana, rectors of several universities in the country, representatives of the Department of Educational Evaluation, Measurement, and Registration (DEMRE) of the University of Chile, and experts in the field.
While the measure initially sought to recognize students' academic performance, it had some negative effects, such as "grade inflation," as detailed in the minutes of the committee's April 10 meeting, which caused the mechanism to lose its ability to differentiate between applicants for higher education. The Grade Ranking, which went into effect in 2013, works by comparing the grade point averages of each student, from 1st to 4th grade, with those of the three previous classes at the same school. According to open data from the Ministry of Education's Center for Studies (Mineduc), the percentage of graduates with a GPA above 6.0 increased from 20% to 41% nationwide between 2011 and 2023. The panel of experts is seeking to implement a "pure ranking," which would mean that high school grades (NEM) would not matter, but only the student's actual position within their educational institution. In this regard, Andrés Barrios , a professor at the Faculty of Education at the University of Los Andes, told El Mercurio that "the incorporation of this instrument into the university admissions system meant, in practice, an increase in the weighting of school grades, which created incentives to inflate grades." While the committee's decision has already been made, there are still some outstanding issues surrounding the system change, such as defining how the new ranking indicator, which will now have a minimum of 458 points, will be distributed and the role it will play in university admissions. Sylvia Eyzaguirre, a member of the ranking committee and a researcher at the Center for Public Studies (CEP), stated that when she worked as an advisor at the Ministry of Education when the instrument was defined in 2012, the team "warned of all the risks involved in this formula, which was poorly conceived from the beginning." Along these lines, he added that "the current bonus favors students at private schools and deepens the socioeconomic bias." The CEP researcher stated that the key to the project will be redefining the criteria the country's universities use to assess the scores of their prospective students. In this regard, he mentioned that "it's curious that some universities weigh up to 70% of the NEM and the ranking, even though these instruments are no longer predictive." For her part, Verónica Santelices , a professor at the Faculty of Education at the Catholic University (UC) and also a member of the panel of experts , emphasized that "any change that is made is not something immediate; it will take effect in two or three years (...) The last thing we want is to harm families or students or generate more anxiety." However, according to El Mercurio, during the session, committee members, such as the rector of the University of Concepción, Carlos Saavedra, expressed concern that the tool could have the opposite effect and increase inflation in grades this year.