Portugal's education minister, Fernando Alexandre, is facing calls for his resignation amid student and teacher protests over the handling of this year's national school exams. Critics accuse Alexandre of failing to take responsibility for what they describe as an unprecedented and chaotic exam season, affecting children aged 14 to 18.
The central issue is Alexandre's initiative to fully digitise the exam marking process. While the government stated this shift was intended to modernise public administration and make evaluations more rigorous for over 260,000 students, many parents, teachers, and students have deemed the change a failure. Some are considering legal action against the state, and a petition calling for the annulment of all this year's results has garnered approximately 19,000 signatures.
Problems with the new system emerged early in the exam season, which began in mid-June. Schools reported errors in paper allocation, including retired and deceased teachers being called to mark exams, and educators being assigned subjects outside their expertise. Teachers also reported difficulties accessing the marking platform, missing pages, incomplete student answers, illegible scanned images, and disappearing answers.
After results were released three days late in mid-July, thousands of students complained of significant discrepancies between predicted and posted grades, with some discovering their grades were still missing. Students requesting copies of their exams reported finding missing pages, unknown handwriting, switched tests, and lost exams. Some students with special educational needs also reported that identifying tags were omitted during digitisation, potentially affecting grading.
An education watchdog later confirmed that 26,000 exams were affected by software or "parameterisation" errors, resulting in more than 18,000 grade changes. Requests for re-evaluation of national high school exams have exceeded 20,000, which is three times more than last year, according to data from the education minister. Each re-evaluation costs €25 (£21) per test, payable by the student.
Alexandre initially blamed staff for failing to remove staples from tests and dismissed complaints about digital marking errors as insignificant. He later 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 education ministry has acknowledged "disruptions in implementation" causing "instability in the education system and anxiety among students and families."