The controversy is repeated every year in the oppositions to access the National Police.
And this 2022 was not going to be less.
Several applicants to the Corps have already filed an appeal against the spelling test included in the process, which was held on February 5 and which the Ministry of the Interior has finally decided to eliminate from future calls after criticism from the unions and the Ombudsman .
This exam, which was canceled in 2017, leaves eight minutes for candidates to indicate whether 100 words included in a list appear in the
Dictionary of the Spanish Language
of the RAE.
According to one of the resources, to which EL PAÍS had access, this year's criticism focuses on three words: “
majorette
” (“girl dressed in a fantasy military uniform who, on festive occasions, parades along with others waving rhythmically a cane and to the sound of a music band”, reads the dictionary);
“
software
” (“set of programs, instructions and computer rules to execute certain tasks on a computer”) and “
stent
” (“device consisting of a metallic mesh in the form of a tube that is implanted in the blood vessels to correct narrowing and prevent obstructions”.
More information
Good spelling is no longer necessary to be a police officer
The dictionary collects these three foreign words, but recommends writing them in italics.
A consideration to which the appellants cling.
"On the exam sheet, these words appeared in round letters, not in italics," claim the applicants after having responded that these terms were not included in the work of the RAE.
“The Royal Spanish Academy considers the three words written in round letters to be incorrect, which is how they appear in the exam, since it literally says that they should be written in italics,” insists the lawyer for several candidates, Ángel Galindo, who made a query to the RAE on this subject and what it has contributed to the procedure.
Beyond this specific case, the unions have been very critical of this test model.
The SUP (United Police Union) has pointed out that this exam “is not useful for determining the spelling knowledge of applicants because, far from being an objective test of knowledge, it seems to respond to an element of easy screening and selection”.
The CEP (Spanish Confederation of Police) elaborates along the same lines: “It is limited to fostering rote skills, distorting the purpose of this exam [...] There may be a circumstance that an opponent knows if a word appears or not in the dictionary of the RAE, but that does not know how to write”.
The list of 100 words included this 2022 in the spelling test of the oppositions to the National Police.
The Ombudsman himself questioned the "reliability" of the test after receiving several complaints: "It is not enough to measure knowledge of the language through its spelling and grammatical rules," the institution said in 2021, when it stressed that this model "could alter the purpose of the same (test) and generate insecurity and little reliability in the participants in the selection process”.
The controversy with this type of test comes from afar.
In 2015, 12 test questions were invalidated due to “spelling errors and inaccuracies”.
In 2017, the Ministry of the Interior was forced to annul the exam after verifying that very few candidates could pass it as it was full of cultisms, archaic terms and Americanisms.
In 2019, appeals were also presented after it was decided to raise the score that had to be achieved to obtain the qualification of "apt" to 6.2, instead of setting the cut-off mark at 5 as in previous calls.
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