Survey Shows Private-School Students Miss Easy Enem Questions
Geekie analysis of 2025 microdata finds up to 45.67% errors on low-difficulty items; interpretation is the main barrier.
Translated from the Portuguese original by the Panorama newsroom. Read in Portuguese
Summary written by the Panorama newsroom from the sources listed below. Facts are attributed to the original publications.
More than 4 in 10 private-school students missed some of the easiest questions on the 2025 Enem in three of the four areas, according to a survey by Geekie Educação seen by g1. It was based on Inep microdata.
The highest error rate was in Natural Sciences (45.67%), followed by Humanities (43.9%) and Languages (43.63%). In Math, 32.84% missed one of the questions analyzed. The study covered 240,131 private-school students and 934,103 public-school students.
In every case, private-school students had higher success rates than public-school students, but the result shows difficulty even on accessible items.
This matters because of Item Response Theory (IRT), which does not assign a fixed score per question and rewards consistency: those who get easy and medium items right tend to score more than those who mostly get the hard ones right. For expert Silvia Brandão, of Arco Educação, it is an "anti-guessing" theory.
According to the experts, errors do not always come from a lack of content knowledge, but from difficulty interpreting context and relating information in the prompt.