Portugal's exam grading crisis: teachers called at last minute as platform failures mount
Just three days before the deadline for grading over 300,000 national exams, Portuguese teachers report being called at the last minute to correct hundreds of new questions as technical problems and assignment overlaps plague the electronic platform.
Last-minute call-ups disrupt grading
Teachers across Portugal were contacted over the weekend by the Júri Nacional de Exames (JNE) with urgent requests to grade additional exam items. One Portuguese teacher told the movement Missão Escola Pública that she had already been assigned over 1,800 responses for 9th grade Portuguese when, on Sunday morning, another 200 questions from the 12th grade Portuguese exam appeared without warning. Another teacher, originally assigned to Literary Portuguese, had received no items for two weeks before being phoned on Saturday evening and switched to standard Portuguese, though he was still waiting for work on Sunday. A third teacher, never initially called, was contacted at 18:00 on Saturday and told to correct nearly 200 questions.
Platform errors pile up
The electronic grading platform EduQA has compounded the chaos. According to the teachers' union Fenprof, instructors were receiving new items to grade "repeatedly and without advance notice", with continuation sheets that appeared complete suddenly expanding, or being matched to a different student's exam. Some teachers were asked to review answers where the attached continuation sheet belonged to another pupil entirely.
This is the most serious situation. A teacher was correcting 9th grade Portuguese with more than 1,800 items and, this morning, found another 200 for 12th grade Portuguese. She can only grade about six compositions a day — far below what is needed.
A teacher who had been assigned to Literary Portuguese from the start reported never receiving a single item to correct, only to be told at the last moment he would be switched to standard Portuguese.
Deadline looms amid quality fears
All corrections for the roughly 300,000 national exams must be finished by Tuesday, 14 July. The first items were sent to teachers on 26 June after the secondary school exam period from 16 to 26 June, but the Education Minister's guarantee of 10 working days for correction was undermined by the platform's successive failures. Teachers are also still waiting for definitive assessment criteria, expected only on Monday afternoon, leaving barely one day to review work. Many fear that the compressed timeline and last-minute additions will compromise the accuracy of the evaluations.
Political and legal reactions
On 17 July, the day results are published, Fenprof will file a complaint with the Procuradoria-Geral da República, demanding an inquiry to determine responsibility for what it calls the "successive failures" of the platform. Meanwhile, at the digitisation warehouse, technicians from EduQA, consultants from Deloitte, and members of the secretary of state's office are searching through thousands of boxes for missing answer sheets, a task previously handled only by teachers and JNE members.
Timeline of the grading process
Key dates in the national exam grading operation show how the process unravelled.
- National secondary exams begin, lasting through 26 June.
- First exam questions are sent to teachers for classification.
- Teachers receive last-minute calls to grade additional exams; some are reassigned to different disciplines.
- New items appear without warning; teachers report overlapping assignments and mixed-up student sheets.
- Deadline for all corrections (around 300,000 exams).
- Exam results released; Fenprof files complaint with Attorney General.
