What each of the five ICFES tests measures

Icfes describes each test in terms of competencies: what you're expected to be able to do with what you learned at school. Knowing that description is useful for something concrete: knowing what kind of reasoning you'll be asked for and how many questions go to each.

Critical Reading

Critical Reading (Lectura Crítica) measures whether you can understand, interpret and evaluate texts from everyday life and from non-specialized academic settings. It has 41 questions, all in the first session.

The first level is literal: what an expression means or who does what in a story. The second asks you to connect parts of the text, tell apart the voices in it and draw conclusions. The third is the truly critical one: evaluating an argument, spotting assumptions, recognizing the author's strategies or placing the text in its context.

There are continuous texts, such as short stories, poems, essays, opinion columns and feature articles, and non-continuous ones, such as infographics, tables, comics, notices and manuals. According to the guide, about 84 % of the questions use continuous texts, and philosophical informative texts account for around 30 %.

You won't be asked about the history of philosophy; you'll be asked how an argument is built. Even so, the guide acknowledges that knowing some philosophers, concepts and debates can help.

Mathematics

There are 50 questions, 25 in each session. The test measures whether you can solve situations with mathematical tools, not whether you remember isolated formulas.

The content is grouped into statistics, geometry, and algebra and calculus. The guide separates generic content, which any citizen needs, from non-generic content, more specific to school mathematics:

• Generic: tables and charts, mean and range, simple counting, fractions, decimals and percentages, proportionality and rates of change, basic shapes and their measurements, the Cartesian plane.
• Non-generic: median, percentiles and variance, combinations and permutations, congruence and similarity, the Pythagorean and Thales theorems, algebraic expressions, functions (polynomial, exponential, logarithmic and trigonometric) and sequences.

Situations can be personal (finances, transportation, health), work-related, community-related or purely mathematical. The guide notes that algebra isn't essential to solve most everyday problems. That doesn't mean you can skip it: it shows up in the abstract situations.

Social Studies and Citizenship

Social Studies and Citizenship (Sociales y Ciudadanas) has 50 questions, 25 per session. It measures whether you understand the social world with the tools of the social sciences and whether you use that understanding to act as a citizen.

Social thinking covers Colombia's Constitution, the social rule-of-law state, the branches of government, the oversight bodies and the mechanisms for citizen participation, as well as placing events in time and space.

The competency with the most weight is perspectives: understanding what each party in a conflict wants, evaluating a source or spotting bias in an argument. The third asks you to analyze how a decision affects the economy, the environment, politics and society at the same time.

The guide says it explicitly: this test doesn't ask you to answer from your opinion or from what is "politically correct". The right answer is the one best supported by the information in the prompt.

Natural Sciences

Natural Sciences (Ciencias Naturales) has 58 questions, 29 per session. It measures whether you use concepts from biology, physics and chemistry to explain phenomena and solve problems, and whether you understand how scientific knowledge is built.

By component, 30 % of the questions are biology, 30 % physics, 30 % chemistry and 10 % Science, Technology and Society (STS):

• Biology: homeostasis, heredity and reproduction, ecological relationships and evolution.
• Physics: kinematics, dynamics, energy, waves, electromagnetism and gravitational fields.
• Chemistry: the atom, types of bonds, properties of matter, stoichiometry, mixtures, solubility and ideal gases.
• STS: topics such as deforestation, the greenhouse effect or waste management. They don't require prior knowledge of the topic.

Inquiry is the competency with the most weight. Many questions show you an experiment or a data table and ask you to decide what can be concluded, which variable was measured or what question that research can answer. Reading a chart well matters here as much as in Mathematics.

English

English (Inglés) has 55 questions, all in the second session. It measures reading and language use in seven parts, aligned with the Ministry of Education's standards and the Common European Framework of Reference (CEFR).

The parts don't all have the same number of options: some offer three (A, B and C), others four, and the first works with a list of seven words. It helps to have seen them before so you don't spend time figuring out the instructions.

English results are reported with CEFR levels. Icfes includes a Pre A1 level, below A1, and the highest level it reports is B+.

How to use this information

• Study in proportion to the percentages. If 40 % of Natural Sciences is inquiry, reviewing definitions alone won't be enough.
• Practice reading data. Tables and charts appear in Mathematics, Natural Sciences, Social Studies and in the non-continuous texts of Critical Reading.
• Review by competency, not just by topic. When you miss a question, identify what you were asked to do: find a piece of information, connect two ideas or evaluate an argument.
• Look at official examples. Icfes publishes question booklets and explained example questions for each test.

To see how these results become your score, continue with how the overall score and test scores work.