Key facts
- Portugal's education minister, Fernando Alexandre, faces calls for resignation over a chaotic national exam marking process.
- The crisis stems from a new system to digitize exam marking, which has led to numerous errors and student complaints.
- Issues included incorrect paper allocation, difficulty accessing the platform, missing pages, and lost student answers.
- An education watchdog identified 26,000 exams affected by software errors, leading to over 18,000 grade changes.
- Thousands of students have requested re-evaluations, and protests have occurred demanding Alexandre's resignation.
Pressure is mounting on Portugal's Education Minister Fernando Alexandre to resign following a chaotic national school exam season, marked by widespread errors in the newly digitized marking process. Students, teachers, and parents have criticized the handling of exams for children aged 14 to 18, with many contemplating legal action and a petition calling for the annulment of all results gaining significant traction.
The government had promoted the digitization of exams as a move towards modernization and increased objectivity for the over 260,000 students participating. However, the implementation has been plagued with issues from the outset, including the allocation of papers to retired or deceased teachers, educators being asked to mark subjects outside their expertise, and significant technical difficulties with the marking platform.
Teachers reported problems such as difficulty accessing the system, missing pages, illegible scanned images, and disappearing student answers. Some, like secondary school maths teacher André Azinheira, expressed uncertainty about whether they were grading complete submissions, leading to potential errors in student grades. Minister Alexandre initially attributed some issues to teachers failing to remove staples from papers and dismissed complaints about the digital platform as insignificant or false.
Following the delayed release of results in mid-July, thousands of students noted extreme discrepancies between their predicted and final grades, with some grades still missing. Upon requesting exam copies, students found evidence of switched tests, unknown handwriting, and lost exams. Students with special educational needs reported that identifying tags were omitted during digitization, potentially impacting their grading.
An education watchdog later confirmed that 26,000 exams were affected by software or parameterization errors, requiring over 18,000 grades to be changed. The number of requests for re-evaluation has surged to over 20,000, three times the previous year's figure, with each re-evaluation costing students €25.
In response to the growing crisis, Alexandre announced that students affected by software errors would not receive less than the minimum pass mark, a decision some teachers believe could unfairly impact college applications. The fiasco has proven politically damaging, with a recent survey showing seven out of 10 Portuguese are dissatisfied with the government, citing the exam debacle as a key reason. Prime Minister Luís Montenegro has so far resisted calls to dismiss Alexandre, while the ministry acknowledged the disruptions caused instability and anxiety, expressing regret.