National exams platform goes offline again – ‘the chaos’ persists

Teachers marking Portugal’s secondary school national exams have been warned that the electronic platform used to correct papers will be temporarily unavailable again on Wednesday – raising fresh concerns over the government’s troubled transition to digital marking.

According to a message shared by the Public School Mission (MEP), the Classification and Supervision Platform will undergo scheduled maintenance, leaving teachers unable to access the system for part of tomorrow.

This latest outage comes just two days after the platform was taken offline because of a security vulnerability identified by specialists supporting the Ministry of Education.

Education Minister Fernando Alexandre said on Monday that no cyberattack had occurred and insisted the system’s “major obstacles” had been resolved.

However, Cristina Mota, speaking on behalf of the Public School Mission, said the latest interruption would further undermine efforts to complete marking within the revised timetable.

“If this is confirmed, it will be another day in which teachers are unable to correct exam papers, making it impossible to meet the deadlines,” she told Lusa news agency.

Portugal is using digital marking for national secondary school exams for the first time this year. Although students in Years 11 and 12 continue to sit their exams on paper, answer scripts are scanned before being distributed electronically to teachers for assessment.

The rollout has been plagued by technical problems from the outset. Teachers have reported delays in receiving exam papers, errors in the digitisation of answer sheets, and repeated faults affecting the distribution and marking platform.

Despite the minister’s assurance that all outstanding exam papers would be allocated by the end of Monday, Mota said the situation remains unresolved.

“There are still markers who have not been able to access the platform, while others who do have access still have no papers to mark,” she explained.

The technical failures forced the government to postpone both the publication of exam results and the second phase of Portugal’s national exams.

Teachers now have until July 14 to complete marking, instead of the original July 10 deadline. But the Public School Mission argues that the four-day extension is unlikely to be enough, given the repeated interruptions.

“We no longer have the full 10 days originally allocated, and many teachers have not even received half the papers they are expected to mark. It will be impossible to meet these deadlines,” Mota warns.

Last week, the teachers’ movement urged the government to postpone the second phase of the national exams until early September, arguing that the revised schedule still fails to address the disruption caused by the digital marking system.

Mota also renewed calls to abandon the troubled digital process altogether – saying the most prudent solution would be to return the exam booklets to schools so teachers could complete marking using the traditional paper-based system.

Parents too are pushing for the entire exam process to be declared null and void.

The embarrassment however that this is causing the government – and which would increase if it effected any kind of late u-turn – is that preparations for ‘digital marking’ have already cost millions of euros (of European PRR funding) and have been presented as a fundamental part of the government’s strategy for bringing educational processes into the 21st century. A failure of this dimension, with exams that determine where pupils go for their further education, will be something very difficult to emerge from with any kind of credibility. And as the parents’ petition says, families are losing trust.

Their concluding paragraphs say: “Parents are not opposing modernisation. They are opposing its rushed implementation, without adequate testing, which put one of the most sensitive processes in our children’s school lives at risk.

“If it is not possible to guarantee, immediately and unequivocally, the complete and rigorous accuracy of the exams, then the only fair, proportionate, and legally sound solution is to annul the 2026 National Exams without any disadvantage to the students.

“Confidence in the education system depends on how this problem is resolved.”

source material: noticiasaominuto