ENADE Turismo common mistakes
ENADE Turismo · Understand the traps and how to avoid them.
Writing a long descriptive answer to a discursive tourism question without ever taking a position or proposing an intervention, when the prompt asks for a diagnosis and a proposal.
Candidates treat the discursive item as an invitation to summarize course content, because in coursework they were rewarded for showing breadth of knowledge rather than for committing to an argued solution; the prompt's command verb (analyse, propose, evaluate) is skimmed.
What to do instead
Before writing, underline the command verb and the object of the question, then draft a one-sentence thesis and a two-line outline (diagnosis, causes, proposal, expected effect). Check the final paragraph explicitly answers the verb; if it only describes, rewrite it as a recommendation with an agent and a timeframe.
Answering objective items about tourism public policy by choosing the option that sounds most ethically desirable rather than the one consistent with the legal instrument described (for example confusing the roles of the three federal levels in the National Tourism Policy).
Normative questions reward the legally correct allocation of competence, but candidates reason from personal opinion or from generic ideas about sustainability and participation, which produce plausible but institutionally wrong distractors.
What to do instead
Build a one-page reference table of the main instruments (National Tourism Policy, tourism regionalization programme, heritage protection rules, environmental licensing) listing for each: issuing level, competent body, and instrument type. When practising, justify each rejection by naming the specific legal or institutional error in the distractor.
In items involving quantitative data (occupancy rates, tourism multiplier, carrying capacity, arrivals statistics), computing with the wrong base or reporting a result without units and without checking whether the magnitude is plausible.
Candidates rush to the arithmetic and skip the step of identifying what the denominator is; they also lack the habit of sanity-checking an answer against the scale of the data given in the item.
What to do instead
Adopt a fixed routine: write the formula, label numerator and denominator with units, substitute, compute, then ask whether the result could exist in the real world. Practise a small set of recurring tourism ratios until the formulas are automatic, and always state units in the final line.
On Enamed clinical items, choosing management based on the single most striking finding while ignoring the patient's stability, age, or comorbidities that the vignette deliberately supplies.
Vignettes are built so that one datum is dramatic and several others are decisive; candidates anchor on the salient abnormality and stop reading, a pattern reinforced by pattern-recognition study habits rather than systematic reading.
What to do instead
Read the vignette twice: first pass for the question asked and the patient's stability, second pass extracting age, sex, time course, vital signs, and key negatives into a short list. Then rank options by whether they address the most urgent threat, and eliminate any option contraindicated by an extracted datum.
Answering Enamed questions on health policy, bioethics, and public health by selecting the option that maximizes individual clinical autonomy, disregarding the collective and legal framework of the Brazilian unified health system described in the item.
Candidates prepare mainly from clinical specialties and treat the collective-health component as low-yield, so they lack the vocabulary of levels of care, referral flows, and ethical-legal duties that the distractors exploit.
What to do instead
Allocate explicit revision time to the collective-health and ethics component, organizing it around the principles of the health system, the levels of care and referral logic, notifiable disease duties, and informed consent. For each practice question, state which principle or legal duty the correct option serves.
On Enamed items describing a procedure or interpretation step, answering what the finding means while ignoring the question of what to do next, or the reverse, thus mismatching the requested cognitive task.
The same clinical scenario can support a diagnostic, therapeutic, or prognostic question; candidates recognize the disease and answer from memory about it instead of re-reading the final interrogative sentence.
What to do instead
Cover the options while reading the last line of the vignette and paraphrase the task in your own words before looking at them. If the task is 'next step', discard options that are definitive treatments when a confirmatory test is still needed, and vice versa.
Writing a teaching-plan discursive answer in the Licenciaturas exam that lists content to be taught but never states learning objectives, methodology, assessment, or how the plan responds to the specific school context given in the prompt.
Candidates draw on lesson-plan templates memorized as lists of topics, and the prompt's context (a stated school situation or student profile) is treated as decoration rather than as the constraint the plan must address.
What to do instead
Use a fixed four-part skeleton: context and justification, objectives stated as observable student outcomes, sequence of activities with methodology, and assessment aligned to the objectives. Explicitly quote or paraphrase the contextual detail from the prompt in the justification so the examiner sees it used.
Treating the Licenciaturas discursive item as a generic essay on the importance of education, producing abstract praise of the teacher's role instead of an argued answer grounded in didactic or curricular concepts.
Under time pressure, generic prose feels safe and easy to produce, and candidates are unsure which technical vocabulary (curriculum, didactic transposition, formative assessment, inclusive education) the rubric expects.
What to do instead
Keep a short glossary of core didactic and curricular concepts and practise inserting at least three of them, correctly used, into every practice answer. Set a rule that every paragraph must contain a concrete claim about teaching practice, not a general value statement.
Across all three domains, spending disproportionate time on one discursive question and leaving objective items or a second discursive answer unfinished, or writing discursive answers with no paragraph structure that the evaluator can follow.
Discursive items feel high-stakes and candidates over-invest in polishing them, while the objective section is treated as quick; without a timing plan, the final items are answered in a rush or left blank, and unstructured text loses coherence points.
What to do instead
Before starting, allocate minutes per item based on the published number of questions, reserving time for review. Answer objective items first at a steady pace, flagging doubtful ones, then write discursive answers from a brief outline with one idea per paragraph and a visible conclusion.
In the Licenciaturas and Enade objective sections, misreading negatively worded items ('except', 'incorrect') and selecting the true statement when the false one was requested.
Most practice material is positively worded, so the reading habit is to scan for a true statement; the negative marker is a single word easily lost in a long stem.
What to do instead
Circle or mentally capitalize the negative marker as soon as it appears and restate the task to yourself as 'find the false one'. When reviewing flagged items, re-read the stem's final line before confirming the choice, and practise sets that deliberately mix positive and negative wording.