How the Saber 11 exam is organized in 2026

Five tests and two questionnaires

Saber 11 is Colombia's national exam for students finishing secondary school. It's taken by students in eleventh grade and also by people over 18 who want to earn their high school diploma. Its results are what qualify you to enter higher education.

The exam has five tests: Critical Reading (Lectura Crítica), Mathematics (Matemáticas), Social Studies and Citizenship (Sociales y Ciudadanas), Natural Sciences (Ciencias Naturales) and English (Inglés). The booklet also includes two auxiliary questionnaires: a socioeconomic one, with questions about your home and family, and a school climate one, about how you see your school. According to Icfes, neither affects your score.

Every test question is multiple choice with a single correct answer. Each one has a prompt (a text, a chart, a situation), a specific task and several options, only one of which answers what is asked.

How the two sessions are split

The exam is taken in one day with two sessions: one in the morning and one in the afternoon. Each lasts 4 hours and 30 minutes. The guide assigns time to the whole session, not to each test, so how you split it within a session is up to you.

Critical Reading is entirely in the morning and English entirely in the afternoon. Mathematics, Social Studies and Natural Sciences are split evenly between the two sessions. So it's a mistake to think of the afternoon as "the English session": the other three areas come back there too.

How many questions count toward your score?

Counting only the five tests, there are 120 questions in the first session and 134 in the second: 254 in total. With the two questionnaires, the full booklet reaches 302.

In its July 24, 2026 announcement, Icfes mentioned 131 questions in the morning and 147 in the afternoon. The difference from the guide matches the 12 school climate questions in each session. For your preparation, what matters are the test questions: 120 and 134.

Other booklets

Everything above describes the standard booklet, taken by anyone who doesn't report a disability when registering. There are other versions:

• People with a disability other than a motor disability can choose between the standard booklet and one with reasonable accommodations, which has fewer questions and keeps the two 4-hour-30-minute sessions. If they choose the accommodated booklet, they also decide whether to take English.
• Members of Indigenous communities or ethnic groups with their own language, for whom Spanish is a second language, choose at registration whether to take English.
• There is an electronic version for Colombian Sign Language users, with the tests presented on video.
• The high school equivalency exam (Validación del Bachillerato), Pre Saber and other groups have booklets with a different number of questions.

If one of these applies to you, check the full orientation guide: it has the table for each version. Any support you need is requested during registration.

2026 dates

Icfes holds Saber 11 twice a year, depending on the school's academic calendar: Calendar B in the first half of the year and Calendar A in the second.

Before each exam, Icfes publishes an exam summons (citación) with your test site, the time and the items allowed. You can look it up on the Icfes website with your ID or your registration number. When Icfes publishes the 2027 dates, we'll update this table.

What this means for your preparation

• Train for long sessions. Staying sharp for four and a half hours is different from solving questions one at a time. Before the exam, do at least one full session under real timing.
• Split your study by each test's weight. Critical Reading, Mathematics, Social Studies and Natural Sciences count three times as much as English in the overall score. We explain it in how the score works.
• Get to know the format before exam day. The question booklets Icfes publishes show what real prompts look like in each test.
• Check what each test measures. It's in what each of the five tests measures.