President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed, this Friday (19), a provisional measure that establishes, with the force of law, the National Medical Training Assessment Examination (Enamed) as an evaluation method for students and medical courses in Brazil, and with a minimum grade requirement for students to practice the profession.
Now, Enamed will be taken every six months and will also be used as the theoretical test for the National Medical Diploma Revalidation Examination (Revalidates) to work in Brazil. The grade will be included on the student’s academic record.
The test will be mandatory for medical students in their 6th year of study. 4th year students will also be able to take the test just as diagnostic effect of the student and the educational institutionwithout the grade being included in the academic record. The minimum grade required is 60 points.
The test will have 100 objective questions, with duration of five hours. The exam correction will use the modified Angoff Method, in which experts estimate, for each of the items, the probability of a minimally competent candidate getting it right.
O new Enamed will be applied in the second half of this yearon September 13th. Registration closes until June 29th and the results will be released on December 4th.
The first edition of Enamed, held last year, showed that around one third of Medicine courses in Brazil did not achieve proficient performance at Enamed, according to the Ministry of Education (MEC).
There were 351 institutions evaluated. Of this group, 304 are under the MEC’s scrutiny. The department initiated supervision proceedings against 99 Medicine courses that obtained grades 1 and 2 in the exam.
Another new feature in the text of the Provisional Measure deals with state and municipal medical institutions, which cannot be supervised by the MEC.
According to the text, state bodies will have to adopt supervisory measures against the colleges under their supervision. The ministry identified that 14 courses assessed as insufficient are not subject to spontaneous supervisory measures.
As Estadão showed, the poor evaluation of state and municipal educational institutions raised the alarm in the MEC, which began to study a legislative measure to ensure that it can act in relation to these institutions.
Furthermore, the department is studying cooperation with States to “harmonize regulatory criteria between the different Education Systems.”
“Enamed is not just a proficiency exam for students, but it has dual functionality to evaluate Medicine courses,” said Marta Abramo, Secretary of Regulation and Supervision of Higher Education at MEC. “We are convinced that the result that comes from this examination is a very precious input, important for regulatory and supervisory actions.”
