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 The Education  Authorities in Madrid have published the Assessment Criteria for the Exam, which will start tomorrow.

Here we are including the scheduled times for the different parts of tomorrow’s exam (18th June 2016) and the marks and assessment criteria provided.

• 9:00 am: You need to be at the room and School assigned to your panel (Link here).  Make sure you arrive well in time, and with all the things you need for the exam. Don’t forget to take a watch or clock to time yourself and help you distribute your time properly. The times are approximate and may vary slightly.
• 9:30 am: Listening Activity starts -(45′)
  • You will be listening to the selected audio twice and will need to take notes to use in your summary and to answer questions on it. This represents 30% of the total mark for Part 1 A.
  • Assessment Criteria:
    • Ability to understand main ideas and significant details.
    • Ability to synthesise, using appropriate language, the relevant information.
    • (I’d add here, well-structured summary, free from grammar mistakes).
• 10:20 am: Text Analysis starts – (75′)
  • You will be analysing a written text from 20th – 21st century, in prose and answering a variety of questions on it. This represents 40% of the total mark for Part 1 A.
  • Assessment Criteria:
    • Ability to understand the text and its communicative intention.
    • Ability to analyse a text in prose.
    • Mastery of written expression.
    • Sound knowledge of English grammar.
• 11:40 am:  Translations start – (60′)
  • You will need to translate
    • 1 text from English into Spanish (15% of total mark for Part 1 A)
    • 1 text from Spanish into English (15% of total mark for Part 1 A)
  • Assessment Criteria:
    • Accuracy and richness in lexis, structures and linguistic resources.
    • Correct usage of Spanish and English
    • Appropriate reflection in the target language of communicative intention from source.

Part A of this first part finishes at around 12:40. 

Part B of the first part:

• You need to be in the assigned room at 15:30
• 16:00 (4:00 pm): Essay writing on topic starts. (2 hours)
  • Assessment Criteria:
    • Scientific rigour in contents
    • Clear, organised, coherent expression
    • Lexical wealth and appropriacy, syntactic correction and flow in topic development.

Remember that, in general, you will be penalised for spelling mistakes and use of abbreviations (although I would say that, in English, things like “e.g.” or “i.e.” should be accepted since they are an essential part of the graphemes used in the written language).

If you make the same mistake several times, you will be penalised only once.

Bear in mind, as well, what we said in the previous post

Good luck to the Madrid and Andalucia candidates and trust in yourself and all the work we have been doing together!