Education Minister Keeps the University Admissions Calendar but Adds a Special September Exam Round

Portugal’s Education Minister has decided to keep the calendar for university admissions unchanged this summer, but will add a special exam session in early September to protect students caught out by errors in the national exam results. Fernando Alexandre announced the move on Monday, insisting that “no student will be harmed” in their grades or their place at university.

The national competition for a place in higher education — the concurso nacional de acesso — opened as planned, with first-phase applications having run at the start of July. Rather than push those dates back, the minister has bolted on an extra round of exams for anyone left short of the information they need to make a second-phase choice. Grades from that September session will count as a second-phase attempt.

What went wrong

The decision follows a run of problems with this year’s exam marking. A classification error in the Física e Química (Physics and Chemistry) exam forced some grades to be revised, and disruptions in the digital grading system left schools scrambling on results day to post marks, process forms and handle re-assessment requests. The minister acknowledged he had learned of some of the errors through the media.

“We are sorry and we apologise once again for the disruption caused,” Alexandre said, addressing students and families in what is one of the most stressful periods of the school year. He has also commissioned an external audit of the digital classification process to establish what failed.

The 25-euro flashpoint

One grievance the government has declined to fix is the fee students must pay to have an exam re-marked. School directors had called for the €25 charge to be scrapped, arguing it is unfair to make pupils pay to correct the state’s own mistakes. Ministers are keeping the fee in place as a taxa moderadora (moderating charge), a decision likely to keep the issue simmering.

Meanwhile, the country’s university rectors had signalled they were willing to postpone the access calendar altogether to give students breathing room — an option the minister ultimately set aside in favour of the September add-on.

Why it matters

In Portugal, national secondary-school exams do double duty: they certify the end of schooling and, weighted alongside internal grades, largely determine which degree and which university a student can enter. A marking error is therefore not a minor administrative hiccup — a fraction of a point can decide whether an applicant makes the cut for a competitive course such as medicine.

For families navigating the system, including the growing number of international residents whose children sit these exams, the episode is a reminder of how tightly the summer timetable is wound — and how a single fault in the grading machine can ripple through thousands of university applications.