The English part of the Pre-icfes left all 11th graders with a headache and completely confused due to the way questions were redacted and how answers were written.

Sunday, February 25th, 11th graders, woke up early and ready to the take one of the biggest exams during the school years, the pre-Icfes. Within the exam, there is a part to test your English level, and being a bilingual school all 11th graders thought they would ace this part until they got to read the first question where they realized this was going to be a confusing test.

“I thought I was reading the questions wrong because I was tired by the time I got to this part but when I turned around and saw all my classmates equally confused, turns out they were just terribly constructed,” said Eliana Lopez, TCS Junior. 

Just like Lopez, all of the students taking the exam looked at the questions confused and even lost as to what it was even asking.

“The English portion was full of grammatical mistakes… simple mistakes that a second grader would make which actually made it harder for us to understand the test,” said Sofia Niño, TCS Junior. 

The mistake that the questions had made the question impossible to even know what they were asking and therefore impossible to answer.

“For the English part,  I had to think things over and think like a translator… I had to change the English I was learning to speak, the proper English, to be able to do good on the test,” said Lopez.

The fact that the students have to think in Spanish and actually translate it in their head to understand the question makes the test be even longer and harder for TCS students.

“A standardized test that’s on a national level should have no errors in grammar, no errors in spelling, and I just founded to be incredible incoherent and not at all accurate,” said Federico Gutierrez, TCS Junior.

Even though the questions were meant to be easy, students had to fix grammatical mistakes in their head to be able to answer them.

“Montessori school was ranked as the best school in Medellin based on the Icfes test,” says in the established newspaper, El Colombiano.

The fact that the English part of the test is so confusing for people who actually know English creates the school to be ranked lower and to be mistaken as to think that the school has poor English.

“This test opened our eyes that we really have a quality English and that if this is the way other schools are teaching English then we really are ahead,” said Niño.