Exam Re-Grade Requests More Than Triple to Over 20,000 as Portugal's First Digital Marking Season Backfires

More than 20,000 requests to have a national secondary-school exam re-marked have landed this summer — roughly three times last year's total — after a first attempt at grading Portugal's exams digitally left thousands of students convinced their scores were wrong. The surge is now bearing down on teachers, who have been handed the disputed papers to re-assess against a tight deadline, with final results due on 7 August.

The Education Minister, Fernando Alexandre, confirmed the scale of the wave. Last year, examiners re-marked around 6,200 first-phase papers; this year more than 20,000 pedidos de reapreciação (requests for re-evaluation) have already come in. A reapreciação is not a casual second look — it is a formal, paid re-marking in which a different examiner reviews the grading of a specific exam, and it can move a final mark up or down.

Why the numbers exploded

The minister points to the mechanics of this year's all-digital marking. For the first time, exam scripts were scanned and distributed to teachers item by item, so that an individual examiner no longer graded a whole paper but only assigned marks to isolated questions. The result, critics say, was a loss of the examiner's overall feel for a candidate's work — and a crop of borderline scores that all but invited an appeal.

The clustering is telling. According to Fernando Alexandre, more than 20,000 grades this year ended on exactly 0.4 of a value — a hair below the next whole mark and, in his own words, "a big temptation to ask for the paper to be re-graded." More pointedly still, some 2,400 students finished with a final classification of 9.4, just one-tenth of a value short of the 10 needed to pass. For those candidates, a successful re-grade is the difference between failing and passing.

A troubled first run

The re-grade flood caps a fraught debut for digital marking. Results slipped past their scheduled dates earlier in the summer, holding up university applications, and teachers lodged a criminal complaint in July over how the grading had been organised. The government has stood by the reform while conceding the rollout was bumpy, and it has kept the university-admissions calendar largely intact despite the delays.

Timing is now the pressure point. The requests were delivered to teachers mid-week, and with final results scheduled for 7 August, teaching unions have warned that the window to re-assess more than 20,000 papers properly is uncomfortably short. Rushed re-marking risks a fresh round of disputes just as the second phase of exams and the university placement round get under way.

What it means for university places

For families, the stakes sit squarely on the Concurso Nacional de Acesso (the national competition for public-university places), where a fraction of a value can decide whether a student clears the entry mark for a course or misses it. The main candidature window runs from 20 July to 6 August, which means the 7 August re-grade results land right against the deadline for locking in choices. Students waiting on a reapreciação should keep a close eye on both dates — and have a backup list of courses ready in case a mark does not move the way they hope.