Catalans must pass English to get a degree

Barcelona.—A new law will mean that all candidates who began their degree studies in the Spanish region of Catalonia this year will have to pass an end-of-course English exam in order to graduate.
The goal of the new legislation is to ensure that Catalan graduates “have no problems with English” when they leave university, something which is not the case at present. A study by the OCU (Spain’s Consumers and End-Users Organisation) revealed that only one in ten graduates currently claims to have an advanced level of English, while a report published by the Cambridge University Press showed that only 13 per cent say they have a “high” or “very high” level.