Calls grow ‘to flunk’ Portugal’s education minister amid exam marking fiasco

 

Calls grow ‘to flunk’ Portugal’s education minister amid exam marking fiasco

 

Fernando Alexandre’s push to digitise marking process deemed a failure with some students and parents contemplating legal action

 

Catarina Fernandes Martins in Lisbon

Fri 31 Jul 2026 07.00 BST

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jul/31/portugal-education-minister-exam-marking-fernando-alexandre

 

Pressure is growing on Portugal’s education minister to resign amid student and teacher protests over his handling of this year’s national school exams.

 

Fernando Alexandre is accused of failing to take responsibility for what critics say is an unprecedented and chaotic school exam season affecting children aged 14 to 18, prompting student protesters to call for him “to be flunked”.

 

At the centre of the controversy, which has plunged the Portuguese education sector into its worst crisis in decades, is Alexandre’s push to fully digitise the process for marking exams.

 

The centre-right government said the shift was necessary to modernise Portugal’s public administration and make school evaluations “more rigorous and objective” for the more than 260,000 students taking exams in primary and secondary schools.

 

But many parents, teachers and students have graded the change a failure and some people are contemplating pursuing legal action against the state. About 19,000 people have signed a petition calling for the annulment of all of this year’s results.

 

The principal of one of the largest school groups in Portugal, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “I struggle to trust in the process after everything that happened.”

 

In the weekly newspaper Expresso, the journalist and political commenter Daniel Oliveira decried the “inexplicable chaos” of the process, attacked Alexandre’s “unspeakable display of incompetence”, and said the credibility of the entire examination system had been “mortally wounded”.

 

It didn’t take long for the cracks to show in the new system, in which digitised, anonymous questions were distributed randomly to teachers and the grading professors’ remit was changed.

 

From the start of the exam season in mid-June, schools reported errors in the allocation of papers, with retired teachers and at least one dead teacher being called to mark them. Some educators were told to mark subjects out of their areas of expertise.

 

While grading the exams, several teachers reported difficulty accessing the marking platform, missing continuation pages, incomplete student answers, illegible scanned images and students’ answers disappearing from the online system.

 

André Azinheira, 32, a secondary school maths teacher, said he had received clear instructions to grade answers despite uncertainty over whether he was assessing a student’s full submission or whether pages were missing.

 

He said: “I knew someone could be wrong, but I had no way of knowing if pages were indeed missing, so I had to do my part. I may have hurt students or not, I have no idea. But I predicted there would be several errors in the grades.”

 

The Guardian heard of other cases in which teachers expressed similar dilemmas.

 

Reacting to growing unease from schools and students, Alexandre blamed staff for failing to “remove staples from the tests”, supposedly complicating the digitisation process. He dismissed teachers’ complaints about errors in the digital marking platform as insignificant or “false”.

 

After the results were released, three days late in mid-July, thousands of students complained about extreme discrepancies between their predicted grades and the posted exam grades, with some realising their grades were still missing.

 

Upon requesting access to a copy of the exam, several students reported finding missing pages, unknown handwriting and answers due to switched tests, and, in some cases, lost exams. Some students with special educational needs have complained that during the digitisation of the tests, the tags identifying those additional needs were left out, potentially affecting the grading.

 

An education watchdog later said that 26,000 exams had been affected by software or “parameterisation” errors, and that more than 18,000 grades were being changed.