ENADE Ciências Sociais common mistakes
ENADE Ciências Sociais · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
On Formação Geral items about ethics, the environment or technology, the candidate reads the alternatives first and picks the one that matches their personal moral or political opinion, then looks for support in the excerpt - often choosing an option that is admirable but not argued in the text.
The themes (fake news, sustainability, inequality, AI) are familiar from the news, so the candidate feels competent and skips the interpretive work; distractors are deliberately written to sound ethically commendable.
What to do instead
Before reading the alternatives, write the excerpt's central claim in one line on the scratch sheet. Accept only the option entailed by that claim; discard any option that introduces a judgement absent from the text, even a 'good' one.
On negatively worded items ('Assinale a alternativa INCORRETA' / 'EXCETO'), marks the first statement that is factually true.
Reading habit: the brain scans for truth, not falsity, and the command word sits in a short line above long, dense alternatives that consume attention.
What to do instead
Circle INCORRETA/EXCETO before reading the alternatives and write 'FALSE' at the top of the scratch space. Paraphrase each alternative as V or F, pick the F, then re-read the command word before transferring to the answer sheet.
The discursive answer restates the prompt in different words, comes as one undifferentiated block of opinion, cites no text from the prova and closes with no concrete proposal.
Habit imported from essay-style exams where length is read as quality; the several commands in the prompt ('apresente', 'relacione', 'justifique', 'proponha') are perceived as a single topic.
What to do instead
Turn each command into a numbered task, write one short paragraph per task, explicitly reference at least one of the motivating texts, and finish with a concrete proposal naming agent, action and target public.
Reads only the headline of a boxed text, chart, table or cartoon and answers from that first line, ignoring axes, units, base year, source and date.
Time pressure plus layout: the alternatives sit immediately after a long visual block, so the candidate jumps to them to 'save time'.
What to do instead
Read the whole box, underlining source and date. For charts and tables, write down the axes, the unit and the reference year before looking at the alternatives, and recompute any percentage or proportion quoted in an option.
Postpones the two Formação Geral discursivas to the last minutes and delivers five or six lines, a fragment, or a blank box.
Objective items give an immediate sense of control, so they get front-loaded; the discursive is treated as low-yield and 'subjective'.
What to do instead
Set a fixed time budget per discursive (e.g., 20 minutes), write a three-bullet outline before drafting, check the minimum number of lines, and never hand in a blank - a structured partial answer still earns points.
Attributes classical concepts to the wrong author: treats anomia as Weberian, ação social as Durkheimian, mais-valia as a Durkheim category, or the types of legitimate domination as Marx's.
The classical authors are studied in separate blocks and memorised as slogan-lists, so the labels survive but the ownership of each concept blurs under exam pressure.
What to do instead
Build a single matrix with columns author / concept / authorial definition / contrasting concept from another author / reference work, and self-test by covering the author column and reconstructing it from the concept.
Defines technical concepts through their everyday meaning: 'fato social' as any relevant social event, 'ideologia' as any doctrine or party programme, 'alienação' as mental illness, 'mais-valia' as profit, 'fetichismo da mercadoria' as consumerism or vanity.
The everyday Portuguese meanings are more available in memory than the technical ones, and items often use the term in a sentence that sounds plausible under the ordinary reading.
What to do instead
For each core concept, memorise the authorial definition plus one empirical example taken from the author's own work (e.g., suicide rates for Durkheim, the factory for Marx), and check the item against the example rather than against the word's common usage.
Confuses basic research-design vocabulary: uses 'amostra' and 'universo/população' interchangeably, inverts dependent and independent variables, treats quantitative as automatically more rigorous, or collapses observação participante, pesquisa-ação and estudo de caso into one label.
Methodology is read as a list of definitions to be recognised rather than as a set of choices tied to a research question, so the terms float free of any decision.
What to do instead
Practise with a decision table: given a research question, state objective, design, technique, instrument and type of analysis. For each technique, write one hypothetical study that would use it and one that would not.
In items on Brazilian social formation, circulates phrases without authorship: files 'homem cordial' under Gilberto Freyre, 'democracia racial' under Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, or discusses coronelismo and patrimonialismo as free-floating descriptions with no link to the author or to the concept behind them.
These expressions circulate in journalism and in teaching as general cultural commonplaces, detached from the books that produced them.
What to do instead
Keep an author–work–concept–critique table (Freyre / Casa-grande & senzala / democracia racial / later critique by Florestan Fernandes; Holanda / Raízes do Brasil / homem cordial and patrimonialismo; Nunes Leal / coronelismo), and always answer by naming the author and the concept, not the phrase alone.
In political-science items, mixes up regime and form of government (treating 'república' as synonymous with 'democracia'), or misstates Brazilian rules - claiming senators are elected by proportional representation, or using 'presidencialismo de coalizão' as a generic synonym for coalition government anywhere.
The vocabulary is overlapping and intuitive, and the Brazilian institutional details are absorbed from news coverage rather than from the formal distinctions.
What to do instead
Separate the axes explicitly - form of government, regime, system of government, electoral formula - and fill in Brazil's value on each axis; for each concept (e.g., presidencialismo de coalizão) record its author, its original diagnosis and the empirical evidence that supports it.