Teachers still being contacted to mark ‘digital exams’ as hours count down…

Portugal’s Education Ministry is facing fresh calls this afternoon to ‘accept defeat’ over the shambolic digital marking of this year’s secondary school exams, and extend the deadline once again.

According to reports, teachers are still being ‘recruited’ to mark exams, just hours before the deadline kicks in, while technical failures affecting the process continue.

Civic movement Missão Escola Pública (Public School Mission) said some teachers were only being called in this morning to replace colleagues on sick leave – leaving them with little or no time to complete the work.

One Portuguese teacher contacted by Lusa said she was summoned this morning but, by lunchtime, was still waiting to receive the exam papers she had been assigned.

“The minister promised us 10 days, and we don’t even have 10 hours,” she lamented.

The Education Ministry has already postponed the marking timetable after persistent technical problems with the digital platform introduced this year for the first electronic marking of Portugal’s more than 300,000 secondary school national exams.

Mota warned that the compressed schedule is making accurate marking impossible.

“No matter how hard they try, nobody can work rigorously under these conditions, especially because teachers will have no opportunity to review their marks,” she said, adding that some teachers are still waiting for missing continuation sheets, while others have received exam questions without the corresponding answer pages.

In many cases, she said, the platform did not even allow users to report the problems.

Although the deadline for completing the marking process falls on today, Missão Escola Pública believes the ministry should extend it again.

“I can believe the minister will declare the process complete, but I think it will be very difficult for some colleagues to finish, particularly with the problems the platform is still experiencing,” Mota said.

She noted that while the publication of exam results had already been delayed by three days, teachers have been granted only two additional days to complete marking.

“There should be at least one more day for teachers to finish the work,” she said.

Mota also described anomalies she has encountered while marking mathematics exams, including around 90 answer sheets that appeared completely blank for two medium-difficulty questions.

She said she believed many students had simply left the questions unanswered, but feared some may instead have written their answers on continuation sheets that were not uploaded to the platform.

Education Minister Fernando Alexandre said on Monday that 92% of the more than 300,000 exam papers had been marked, leaving roughly 20,000 still outstanding with one day remaining before the revised deadline.

The troubled rollout of digital marking has been beset by technical failures since the process began, prompting repeated criticism from teachers’ organisations, delays to the examination calendar and growing concerns over the reliability of this year’s assessment process.

Parents are demanding the whole process be ‘annulled’, while the government’s minister for state reform has not really helped the situation by saying that ‘every reform involves trial and error’.

Source: SIC Notícias/ LUSA