Entrance exam 2025: essay topics address current events – 12/29/2025 – Education

The essay remains one of the central stages of university entrance exams in the country. Present in practically all selection processes, the test combines a high weighting in the final mark with correction criteria specific to each jury, which requires specific preparation on the part of the candidates.

During the exams administered this year, the proposed themes entered into dialogue with contemporary debates in Brazilian society. Population aging, social inequalities, labor relations, violence against women and the impacts of AI (artificial intelligence) were among the most recurring topics. There was also space for philosophical reflections, linked to ethics, individual rights and social transformations.

According to the teachers interviewed by the Leafin general, the proposals maintained the line of recent years, combining social issues, variety of genres and freedom of argument.

In addition to subject choice, universities maintained – and expanded – the diversity of required textual genres. Although the argumentative essay remained the predominant model, many entrance exams required letters, chronicles, manifestos, personal narratives, and texts of an informative or analytical nature. In some cases, the candidate had to produce more than one text in the same test.

According to Poliedro Educação’s writing coordinator, Gabrielle Cavalin, the centrality of writing in university entrance exams is not new. Since 1977, when a decree made the inclusion of an exam or dissertation question in Portuguese mandatory, textual production began to occupy a place in the selection processes of public and private universities.

The measure was born in a context of concern about reading and writing rates in the country and has consolidated, over the decades, as an instrument for assessing essential skills for academic life and the exercise of citizenship. It is no coincidence that the essay usually has a high weight in the final grade and in many entrance exams it serves as a tie-breaker.

Regarding the predominance of the argumentative thesis, Cavalin notes an increase in the number of tests that require texts related to specific genres and communicative situations, in accordance with the BNCC (National Common Curricular Base) guidelines. This is the case of Unicamp and, more recently, of Fuvest’s second proposal. “All these tests reaffirm the centrality of writing and the need to master aspects such as coherence, cohesion, linguistic adequacy and critical reading of the collection,” he specifies.

Find out below the themes and essay formats required for this year’s Brazilian entrance exams:

Enem

Fuvest

Unicamp

Unesp

UFG

UFSC

Manifest: on Brazilian social inequalities, signed symbolically as a representative of the favored or disadvantaged class;

Chronic: on social inequalities;

Letter: for yourself in the future, to read in 2030, with proposals for a less unequal society.

UFRGS

UFPR

Text production and comprehension test, composed of three discursive tasks:

Informative and analytical text: on the decline in the birth rate in Brazil, according to IBGE data;

Explanatory text: based on an interview on artificial intelligence given by Andrew Smart;

Summary: text on the social and environmental impacts of the Belo Monte and Pimental dams, in Pará.

UnB

First person account: “The experience of being violently evicted from one’s home”, with contextualization of time and place, reflection on the causes of estrangement and the relationship to the past and to the community.