The student named Orión scored 115 correct answers out of 120 on UNAM’s entrance exam. For Médico Cirujano, the cutoff rose to 117 1. He did not get in. This is not a story about one disappointed applicant. It is the consequence of a system whose gatekeeping mechanism—the admission exam—has become untrustworthy in its own success.
UNAM’s first fully online admission exam produced an anomaly: minimum scores for top careers jumped sharply, and an unprecedented number of near-perfect scores appeared 14. The university has now ordered a special commission to review the process 4. The institutional response is correct in form—investigate the integrity of the test—but it sidesteps a deeper access problem. When the top of the score distribution compresses, the students who lose out are not the weak ones. They are the strong ones who happened to be on the wrong side of a statistical spike.
The scale of the distortion matters. UNAM is Mexico’s largest university, and its admission exam is the primary filter for tens of thousands of applicants each year. If the online format introduced noise—whether from cheating, technical advantages, or uneven proctoring—then the 2026 cohort carries a cohort-wide legitimacy deficit. The commission’s findings will determine whether this year’s admits are seen as fairly selected or as beneficiaries of a broken process. That uncertainty is itself a harm to students who now cannot know whether their rejection was merit-based or artifact-based.
Compare this with other systems in the region. Colombia’s Saber 11 exam, administered by Icfes on July 26, remains a standardized, in-person test whose results serve as a gateway to higher education 2. It is not immune to controversy, but it has not produced the kind of score compression that UNAM now faces. The contrast highlights a tradeoff: online administration expands access to the test itself but can degrade the test’s validity as a signal of ability.