UFRJ will change calculus curriculum to try to avoid evasion of quota holders

Deputy Renata Sousa (PSOL-RJ) has an explanation for the high failure rate among students in the calculus discipline at UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). She believes the culprit is institutional racism. “The disparity in the success rates and retention of black students shows the institutional racism that prevails not only in universities, but in several institutions in our country”, she said two weeks ago, at a university event.

And UFRJ leaders seem to agree with the diagnosis.

At the same event — the inaugural class of a course dedicated to supporting quota students — the director of the UFRJ Polytechnic School, Cláudia Morgado, announced measures to reduce the level of difficulty of the Calculus subject. “It can’t be normal to fail 70% of the class; and worse, systematically. It is not a phenomenon that happens punctually in a semester. And this high failure rate reached unbearable levels,” she said.

According to an internal UFRJ survey, the graduation rate of black students in Engineering is 42%, against almost 90% of white students. Numbers like these rarely surface. Generally, defenders of the quota system deny that the performance of quota students is inferior to that of non-quota students. But they are contradicted by research done on the subject.

UFRJ adopted the quotas (initially, for public school students) in 2008. Since then, the reservation of vacancies has become the rule throughout the country. In 2012, a law passed by Congress and sanctioned by Dilma Rousseff established that 50% of vacancies in federal universities would be reserved for the quota system, including students from public schools, blacks and indigenous people.

The Brazilian quota system — in which all major universities are required by law to reserve half of the places for quota holders — is unique in the world. In the United States, for example, the reservation of a specific number of vacancies according to race was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1978. Only India has a model similar to the Brazilian one. The difference is that, in India, the age-old caste system actually generates explicit discrimination against groups considered inferior. Nothing like it existed in Brazilian history.

Studies show disparity

According to the narrative of quota holders, studies would prove that there is no significant difference between quota holders and non-quota holders. But there are two problems with this.

First, the argument ignores the dropout rate among students who entered through quotas, which is much higher.

Second, it also ignores a side effect of quotas: the reduction in the level of demand for courses, as UFRJ intends to do.

The admission system to public universities is based on the premise that the entrance exam is an effective indicator of student preparation: those who get the best grades deserve to go to college because they have demonstrated that they are more qualified to enter higher education. So it’s not surprising that students who enter with a lower grade have more difficulty succeeding in their courses.

And research demonstrates this — although the degree of difference between quota holders and non-quota holders fluctuates according to the survey.

A study carried out at UnB (University of Brasília) in 2014 found a visible difference, even when discounting the parents’ educational level or the type of education received in high school. For example: the general average of the IRA (Academic Performance Index) of quota students who studied in public schools is 3.5% lower than that of non-quota students who also came from public schools.

According to the same survey, quota students who entered UnB in 2009 had a higher dropout rate (27.9% against 23.5%). In Engineering, the difference was more visible: while 39% of quota holders left the course, 17.2% of non-quota holders did.

Another study, based on data from UFES (Federal University of Espírito Santo), went in the same direction, but with a much more alarming result: “The Odds Ratio value [razão de probabilidade] equal to 11.91 for the quota student indicates that the chance of a student who enters through the quota system to drop out is 11.91 times the chance of a non-quota student to drop out”, concluded the authors.

A third article, focusing on technical education, reached similar conclusions.

When interviewing students who had dropped out of their courses, the authors noticed that the difficulty of the course was the main reason for dropping out of quota holders. Among non-quota students, this reason is much less frequent (other reasons, such as lack of identification with the course, are more common). The article was written by a professor at the Federal University of Alfenas and published in 2020.

Another survey, produced at UFG (Federal University of Goiás) and focused on Accounting students, showed that the grade of students who entered through the universal system was 6.33, against 6.21 of quota holders. The failure rate was also higher among quota students, although the difference was small.

A study carried out by a researcher from UFMG (Federal University of Minas Gerais) and published in 2014 brought more impressive numbers. Alvaro Alberto Ferreira Mendes Junior discovered that, in the Physics course at UERJ (University of the State of Rio de Janeiro), the CR (Income Coefficient) of non-quota students was 73.2% higher than that of quota students. The disparity was also large in other areas, such as Computer Science (43.2%), Philosophy (26.1%) and Statistics (18.7%). Data were collected between 2005 and 2012. “The difference in terms of average grades increases as the relative difficulty of the course increases”, concludes the author.

The case of UERJ is emblematic because the university was the first to adopt the racial quota system, back in 2003. Interestingly, despite the great disparity in the performance of quota holders in relation to non-quota holders, there is no significant difference in dropout rates. In other words: the performance of quota holders is much worse, but they are still there.

The cost of evasion

The higher evasion and worse performance of quota holders in public universities mean a waste of public resources. The average cost of a federal university student is approximately R$ 40,000 per year. A student who drops out after attending two years of college, therefore, will have cost BRL 80,000 — in addition to the time he wasted at a crucial moment for his professional training.

For Professor Marcelo Hermes-Lima, from the Institute of Biology at the University of Brasília, the high dropout rate among quota students is an “obvious” problem and one that, in some cases, generates pressure for a more lenient evaluation by professors. But he adds that the statistics are a symptom of an even bigger problem: the disconnect between academia and the market. “It is a misfit. The market goes one way and academia goes the other. And people notice that academia often trains students for professions that don’t exist,” he says.

debate on merit

The attempt to reduce or eliminate the importance of merit in the evaluation of the higher education system does not happen only at UFRJ.

In an article published last month in Folha de S. Paulo, the president of ANPOF (National Association of Graduate Studies in Philosophy), Érico Andrade, defended that the distribution of funds to federal universities should no longer be linked to performance criteria, like today. For him, the current system promotes social exclusion. His position generated an intense reaction.

An article signed by eight former ANPOF presidents countered Andrade’s proposal. While praising the quota system, they argue that rejecting excellence as an evaluation criterion means “undermining one of the pillars of social and economic development”.

The harshest criticisms came from Gustavo Castañon, professor of Philosophy and Psychology at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora. In an open letter calling for Andrade’s resignation, he wrote: “The process of transforming the Brazilian humanities postgraduate course into an action between militants for the production of texts irrelevant to society and the distribution of increasingly demoralized academic titles has reached a critical point. ”