Exam-Grading Chaos Freezes University Applications: Just 304 Sign Up on Day One, Against 10,000 a Year Ago
Portugal's national university-access competition opened with only 304 first-day applications, down from 10,183 a year ago, as thousands await revised exam grades after digital-marking errors. There are 56,790 places; the first phase still closes on 6 August, with results due 23 August.
The race for a place at a Portuguese university opened this week to a near-silence that spoke volumes. On the first day of applications to the concurso nacional de acesso ao ensino superior (national higher-education access competition), just 304 candidates submitted a bid for a place — against 10,183 on the equivalent day a year earlier, a collapse of roughly 97%. The reason is not a sudden loss of appetite for university, but a grading crisis that has left thousands of teenagers unable to know their own exam marks.
Applications to the first phase run from 20 July to 6 August, with results due on 23 August and a second phase opening the next day. But many students are holding back because they are still waiting for national exam grades to be revised after a wave of digital-classification errors. Without confirmed marks, applicants cannot judge which courses they can realistically reach, and so they wait rather than gamble their limited choices.
The errors stem from a change in how exams were run. For the first time, 11th- and 12th-grade students sat their roughly 290,000 tests on paper, which were then scanned and graded electronically — a hybrid process that has been plagued by access failures, digitisation faults and incomplete answer capture. One error in the Physics and Chemistry exam alone affected 12,613 students, and schools have reported hundreds of re-assessment requests as families scramble to correct marks before the application window closes.
The stakes are high because the places are finite and unevenly distributed. This year’s competition offers 56,790 vacancies in public higher education under the general access regime — 34,841 at universities and 21,949 at polytechnic institutes. Some of the most sought-after fields have been reinforced: Medicine has 1,656 places, 62 more than last year, and Basic Education has 1,344, an increase of 147 — modest expansions in areas where the state is trying to ease chronic shortages of doctors and teachers.
The government has tried to steady nerves without conceding that the system failed. The Education Minister, Fernando Alexandre, promised that “all students will have final classifications by the end of this week,” and announced a special exam session to run from 3 to 8 September for those left in limbo. He acknowledged that some candidates had already been harmed by the delays while rejecting the charge that the paper-and-scan overhaul amounted to “experimentalism.”
For families weighing a move to Portugal, or for foreign residents whose children are coming through the Portuguese school system, the episode is a useful if unwelcome window into how university admission works here: a single national competition, phased over the summer, in which exam grades are the currency and the calendar is unforgiving. The dates have not moved — the first phase still closes on 6 August — even as the marks that feed it remain in flux.
Whether the low turnout is merely deferred or a sign of deeper disruption will become clear as the deadline nears and the promised corrected grades arrive. If they land on time, the applications may simply bunch into the final days. If they do not, the pressure to bend an already tight calendar will only grow.
