North and Northeast account for half of the 1,000 grades in the Enem essay

The Northeast region was the region that concentrated the largest number of essays with a score of 1,000 in the National High School Exam (Enem) 2023. In total, 25 of the 60 students who achieved the maximum grade across the country are from northeastern states. Adding the region to the North of the country, with five students, both have half of the students scoring 1,000 in the test administered at the end of last year.

In Piauí, there are six students. The state, together with Rio Grande do Norte and Rio Grande do Sul – each also with six students scoring 1,000 – is only surpassed by Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, each with seven students. For the director of the Equação Certa school, in Teresina, Fernando Gomes, the result is fantastic. At school, there are three students who achieved top marks. But, according to him, it is the fruit of work that was already being carried out with the students.

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“For us it’s something fantastic, it makes us very happy. But it’s not something new, it’s something we’ve already been producing”, says Gomes. The school has already had three other students with a grade of 1,000, but one per year. Now there were three together. “We were hitting the beam, many students got a grade of 980”. Furthermore, he highlights the achievement of the state. With fewer students than Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo, Piauí had almost the same number of 1,000 students.

“If we were to compare proportionally, they would have to have 60 1,000 notes”, calculates the director. “So, proportionally, it is an overwhelming result”, he celebrates.

One of the students who obtained the maximum score was Millena Martins, 19 years old. “The feeling with the Enem result is one of great happiness and fulfillment for having achieved the maximum grade. Both mine and my friends and family who have always supported me in the process”, says the student who intends to study medicine.

“My preparation was, basically, training weekly, writing an average of two essays a week and correcting them the following week, focusing on errors so that I could improve my writing as quickly as possible and arrive at an excellent text”, he says. Martins.

Increase in 1 thousand notes

The number of students scoring 1,000 more than tripled between Enem 2022 and the last edition. In the first, there were 18 candidates with the maximum score, in Enem 2023, 60. The professor and researcher in applied linguistics at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp), Marcia Mendonça, researches the teaching and learning of the Portuguese language. For her, the numbers show a possible resumption of Enem, which, over the last few years, had fewer registered candidates.

“I think that the increase in grades reflects a greater investment on the part of schools in preparing students, which can be understood, perhaps, as an indicator of greater confidence in the exam and a certain return to normal growth, within the scope of this examination, in its importance”.

O essay topic“Challenges to face the invisibility of care work carried out by women in Brazil”, may also have helped the students' performance, according to the researcher.

“I think the topic had great social relevance, it is an issue that is present in the social debate, that is, it is not a topic far from students. This certainly helped the candidate to get closer to the collection, to get closer to organizing the requested text. So, the choice of the theme, yes, I imagine it was positive in that sense”.

Public schools

You data released by the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (Inep) this Tuesday (16) also show that of the total of 60, only four candidates come from the public school system, with 40% of the total students who participated in the national exam coming from the public school system.

This result could have several causes, according to Paulo Carrano, professor at the Faculty of Education at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF). According to him, these causes range from the infrastructure of schools to the socioeconomic situation of families and territories. And they also include the fact that students often need to balance studies with work. “We are still chasing an accumulated social debt that Brazil owes to its youth,” he says.

Many students who completed high school in 2023 stopped taking the Enem. Data from the Ministry of Education show that around half of the students who were completing the stage last year did not participate in the last edition of Enem. Faced with this situation, the Minister of Education, Camilo Santana, announced that students in the 3rd year of high school will receive financial incentive to participate in the exam.

Also on Tuesday, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva sanctioned the law that creates a type of savings for low-income students to complete high school.

“Also having this support that allows young people to withdraw a monthly resource to support themselves is very important. So, I believe that in the coming years this support policy, of monthly scholarship and savings at the end, will have results. Because it will affect exactly this factor of evasion, of disengagement, which is this centrifugal force that keeps young people away from the school environment, which is the world of work, which is the precariousness of life”, analyzes Carrano.