Exam marking fiasco “isn’t down to us”, claims company tasked with creating IT platform

BLAT, the company that developed the now infamous platform used to correct national exams in Portugal, has said that it followed the specifications set by the Institute for Education, Quality and Assessment (EduQA) and only intervenes in the system “upon request”.

“BLAT developed the marking platform for IAVE/EduQA and is responsible for its design and development, in accordance with the specifications set by IAVE/EduQA, intervening at the latter’s request,” the company stated in a response to Lusa news agency yesterday, as this scandal continues to build.

With tabloid Correio da Manhã headlining its edition today with “Company with no track record in exams chaos”, the main takeaway appears to be that BLAT – Creative Powerhouse is a design consultancy. It is not a company with any experience in running platforms handling such sensitive issues as the marking of exams, crucial to the future of the young people taking them. Indeed, as it explains, it is not running this platform, nor controlling its quality; it simply devised it.

And this, according to CM’s deputy director general Armando Esteves Pereira, is what is so shocking.

How could “something so important like the digitisation of exams” be delivered to a company with no track record, on such an ‘ad hoc’ basis, he asks?

Even this question is a little spurious as BLAT insists it has had nothing to do with the digitisation (which is going on at the Mint). BLAT simply devised the marking platform…

For Esteves Pereira, the “level of amateurism that this process reveals, shows the level to which Public Administration has fallen. In any private company, those responsible for this kind of collapse would have been instantly fired”. But in this case, almost every entity involved insists “it’s not our fault”…

PS Socialists have already called for the Prime Minister to get personally involved (even if only to give all those affected an apology); teachers’ federation FENPROF is calling for the resignation of education minister Fernando Alexandre; parents are calling for the digital marking to be abandoned altogether, and other opposition parties have called for a parliamentary inquiry.

But the fact remains that thousands of school-leavers expecting to apply for further education this summer have no idea what is happening to the exams they have sat (or will sit): the faith in this first chaotic foray into ‘digital marking’ has been utterly broken.

How it all started to unravel? Lusa explains:

“For the first time this year, the 11th and 12th-year exams, which are still sat on paper, are being marked digitally – a process which involves them being scanned and only then distributed to teachers for marking.

“In this process, the answer sheets are first scanned and uploaded to the exam processing and handling platform, managed by the Institute for Education, Quality and Assessment (EduQA), and only then uploaded to the distribution and marking platform.

“According to the minister of education, science and innovation, BLAT was the only external entity involved in the process, acting as the company responsible for developing the distribution and marking platform, which has been in use since 2018, at that time under the guidance of the Institute for Educational Assessment (IAVE) (an entity which has since been dissolved, with its functions taken over by the newly created EduQA).

“Since the start of the exam marking process, the IT systems have been experiencing problems, particularly relating to the digitisation of exam papers.

“To resolve the faults in the exam processing and handling platform, EduQA recently sought the support of an external consultancy firm – Deloitte – which, according to the minister, is also monitoring the remaining stages of the process.

“When asked about the nature of its current involvement, the company responsible for the marking platform stated only that it intervenes “at the request” of EduQA and denied any responsibility for the digitisation errors.

“BLAT is not responsible for the digitisation of exam papers, quality control, file submission, user management, determining which papers are marked, when they are marked or by whom, nor for any other operational procedures involved in the marking process,” the company states.

In its response to Lusa, BLAT explains that the platform “merely makes the files available to markers as it receives them from external systems and makes the exam papers available when the authority so decides”.

On Monday, the platform was down for several hours due to a “vulnerability” in the system’s security, as explained by the minister of education.

The system was again unavailable on Wednesday between midnight and 2.00 am, during which time it underwent further maintenance “to optimise processes”, in the words of the education minister .

When asked about the two technical interventions on the system, BLAT did not clarify the reasons, nor its role in identifying and resolving the issues, Lusa adds.

Added to these issues, have been anomalies thrown up by the Ministry of Education’s own database, which according to school directors, is so out of date it found them summoning dead and retired teachers to participate in the marking process.

sources: Correio da Manhã/ Lusa