Digitalisation exam ‘fiasco’ descends into unseemly ‘blame game’

The ‘chaos’ – some have said ‘fiasco’ – surrounding Portugal’s first foray into ‘full digitalisation of national exams’, has descended into an unseemly ‘blame game’, with the Minister of Education, Science and Technology refusing to take any responsibility for a process which schools and teachers say was simply not adequately prepared.

Refuting this criticism wholeheartedly, Minister Fernando Alexandre has said the fault lies with the schools, and their directors.

He then dragged the very 21st century problem back decades by suggesting one of the complications resulted from schools’ (obstinate) use of staplers.

“The schools received instructions not to staple exam papers, but some did,” he told reporters. “And some of these stapled over the QR code, which identifies the exam, and the pupil.”

“In unpicking the staple, the disruption it caused the digitalisation was one of the problems…” particularly as it caused pupils’ exams to part company in some instances, with random pages reaching different teachers assigned for marking.

As for the ‘summoning’ of dead teachers to take part in the process, this was a matter ‘entirely’ for the schools themselves, said the minister, almost visibly washing his hands of the litany of complaints.

But, as Filinto Lima, president of the national association of directors of school groupings, has pointed out, the schools were all working with “the obsolete IT system of the Ministry of Education”.

In Lima’s view, the chaos stems from “digitalising millions of pages, and a marking platform that does not work”.

“Passing the buck is not the answer”, he said, in response to Minister Alexandre’s attempt at a clean exit. “It creates more anxiety for pupils and teachers, and does not bring peace. There are teachers (now) receiving papers to mark, but the deadlines are getting tight.”

The initial July 6 deadline for the digital marking of more than 160,000 national exams has been put back to July 10, with July 14 still the date when results are due to be displayed in the various secondary schools throughout the country.

Minister Alexandre has stressed that problems are being solved, and that everything will be sorted in time for the various deadlines. “We guarantee that no pupil will be prejudiced,” he has said.

But there is a clue to a possibility that all this technology (and rushing about with exam papers to the Mint) was a bit too much for the country to take on board in the boiling heat. Minister Alexandre has said there will be an ‘audit’ of the process once it is over, “to evaluate if the new method continues, or if we go back to the old one” (the one where no one complained, things were done ‘manually’, and exam papers stayed together, thanks to well-fastened staples).

Source material: Correio da Manhã