Even after the required pass mark was lowered to 3.5 out of 10, that is to say, after many who failed were allowed to slip through, it has proved impossible for sufficient numbers of would-be young members of the Spanish National Police Corps to accredit the required level of proficiency in spelling. Because of this, and after the latest controversy in a Spanish-language spelling test which included ill-conceived anglicisms, those responsible for recruiting have decided that they will no longer take into account whether Spain's future keepers of law and order are literate or not. As the Corps has communicated, in the next calls for candidates, "spelling will be removed as an exclusionary selection test", although it also warns that "related content may be included in the knowledge test". According to the Spanish Police, this is an "improvement" in the selection processes, which are governed by regulations established in 1989. However, for years, these tests have put some "pain" into Spain for the country's future cops. The latest example is from last weekend. Thousands of aspirants prepared for a psychotechnical test, on personality, biodata, knowledge and theory, spelling and languages. All of these had already passed the physical tests held last November. In the spelling section, applicants had to consider a hundred words, ticking box A, if they thought the term was correct, or B, if they thought it was wrong. As easy as Wordle, right?
Foreign words
To give an idea of the difficulty, there were three words that a good proportion of the candidates from around the Spanish state considered to be incorrect: stent, majorette and software. According to some of those sitting the test, the three words were written in normal, roman text and, for that reason, the candidates considered them to be errors, because they should have been written in italics to be valid. The frustrated applicants argue that the dictionary of the Real Academia Española, which serves as the basic reference work for the tests, states that foreign words - like these three - should be written in italics and not in roman letters. Hundreds of people affected have now prepared appeals against these three words, which could make the difference between exceeding the cut-off point of 5 in their overall average across all tests. However, the template of correct answers published this Monday by the National Police states that the three words, written in roman letters, not in italics, get the thumbs up. A correction that "would go against the spirit of the Spanish academy's dictionary, on which the test is based." "In any case, the general rule of writing foreign words must always be respected with a graphic style that indicates their condition, which, as has already been explained, is preferably through the use of italics or, secondarily, in quotation marks", according to the report of the philologist Cristobal E. González, whom this group of aspirants enlisted as an expert witness for their defence.
What a palaver!
The previous test, in 2021, was the first time that it had included correctly-written words that were not found in the RAE dictionary. In fact, it was due to the difficulty of last year's test, that the cut-off mark (really, the pass mark) was already lowered to 3.5. The decline in this test - which does not include any testing of knowledge of the Catalan, Basque or Galician languages - has been very graphic in recent times. The requirement just three years ago was a score of 6.2 or better, an exigency in 2019 which meant that more than 4,000 applicants were left out. However, this is not the first time that the drastic option of removing this exam from the requirements has been taken. In 2017, the same test was cancelled after police union complaints - and on that occasion, the words that the candidates had to correct were more everyday. But that time, as well, it was stated in justification that the terms included in the rejected exam were not essential knowledge for police officers or were terms that they would not use in their day-to-day.
To get an idea of the degree of difficulty, the 2021 exam included terms such as cascabel, claraboya, biquini, carriño, aruñar, yuyo, champurrear and duunvirato which were to be marked as correct or incorrect. There were only 28 incorrect words in the 100 word test, including sumerjir, entreveer, remake, desbarar, ecatombe and ventiuno. Only 3,956 of the 16,255 applicants who sat the test passed the cut-off point in the exam. The rest called for the exam to be rejected: "They compel you to know all 90,000 words in the RAE dictionary," protested some of the aspirants.