A Backup Fix for Unreadable QR Codes Spread Fresh Errors Through Portugal's Exam Marking, Deloitte Report Finds

When scanners could not read the QR code on a page of this summer's national secondary school exams, the system fell back on reading the number printed underneath. According to a report by the consultancy Deloitte, released by the Ministry of Education on Tuesday, that fallback worked worse than the method it replaced and spread new errors through the rest of the process.

The Ministério da Educação, Ciência e Inovação (Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation) sent two reports to parliament's education and science committee and to the Conselho Nacional de Educação (National Education Council): Deloitte's, written as technical support to EduQA (the Instituto de Educação, Qualidade e Avaliação, or Institute of Education, Quality and Assessment), and a second from the Júri Nacional de Exames (JNE, National Exams Board). Both deal with this year's on-screen marking of the national exams, which had been piloted in 2025.

A double failure in the first phase

Each scanned page carries a QR code linking it to its exam, and in the first phase the system did not recognise a significant share of them. The fallback mechanism, which read the conventional number printed below the code, had "recognition levels substantially lower than QR code reading", the Deloitte report says. It introduced "additional errors in the identification and consistency of the exams", which carried through to later stages.

Deloitte lists other problems it rates as highly critical:

• the procedure for continuation sheets was not applied in the same way everywhere, and some blank sheets were not scanned;
• the number of incidents reported by markers exceeded the capacity to answer them;
• scanned files and the content on the marking platform did not always match, and the report could not establish conclusively where every discrepancy came from;
• the software that read multiple-choice answers had to be revised because students mark their choices in many different ways.

Incidents were concentrated in Portuguese, Physics and Chemistry A, Mathematics A, and Biology and Geology. Published accounts of the reports give no count of the students or grades affected.

What was fixed

During the first phase, EduQA and Deloitte built a new algorithm for reading the QR codes and used it to reread every code already processed. In the second phase, damaged, crossed-out or illegible codes were checked by a person, and the need for manual identification fell sharply, the report says.

The exam board's proposal: a paid pool of markers

The JNE report says the process ran in "particularly demanding" conditions and "exposed unexpected technical vulnerabilities". Its main proposal is a stable, contracted pool of teachers to mark the secondary exams, with the rules on selection, training, availability, pay and replacement fixed before each exam season rather than during it. It also wants automated checks at critical stages. Deloitte, from the management side, found that those running the process lacked a clear view of markers' availability and pace of work.

The minister, Fernando Alexandre, has already said markers are allocated in a way that "is not efficient", and wants teachers contracted and paid to mark a set of items.

What comes next

The government has also asked the National Education Council for an independent assessment of the external evaluation model, due to reach parliament by the end of the year. Separately, the Bloco de Esquerda's proposed commission of inquiry into the digital marking of the 2025 and 2026 exams, which had the votes to go ahead in mid-September, would examine the contracts, costs and supervision behind the system.

National exam grades feed into university application scores; see our guide to applying to a public university in Portugal.