ModA Digital National Tests Begin on Wednesday 27 May with Grade-4 Educação Artística as the Pilot Subject on the Fully On-Screen Format

Portuguese schools turn on the fully digital ModA (Monitorização das Aprendizagens) national tests today, Wednesday 27 May 2026, with Grade 4 Educação Artística as the opening paper. The format succeeds the legacy Provas de Aferição retired at the end of the 2024/25 school year and runs on a rolling window through 9 June 2026, with each agrupamento de escolas setting its own dates within the national perimeter set by IAVE — the Instituto de Avaliação Educativa.

The Calendar

The ModA window opens today and closes on 9 June. Grade 4 sits Educação Artística, Português (with the variants for Portuguese Sign Language and Portuguese as a Non-Native Language) and Matemática. Grade 6 sits Inglês on 29 May, then Português and Matemática through the first week of June. The 9th-grade ModA cycle ran earlier in the school year and is closed. Schools are required to schedule the test on the same day for all Grade 4 pupils within the school; the Inglês and Português oral-production components run across the full 27 May to 9 June window.

The Format Shift

The on-screen format is the structural novelty. The legacy Provas de Aferição used a hybrid paper-and-tablet model with paper booklets and a digital answer sheet on shared school devices; ModA runs entirely on the device, with multimedia stimuli, drag-and-drop interactions, voice-record items for the speaking components and adaptive routing on selected mathematics blocks. The school must provide a workable device per pupil and a stable network — the bandwidth and Wi-Fi requirements were stress-tested in the late-April provas-ensaio cycle, where a handful of schools registered Wi-Fi failures that the IAVE has since worked through with the Direção-Geral dos Estabelecimentos Escolares network team.

What ModA Measures

ModA is, like its predecessor, a monitoring instrument rather than a graded assessment. Estas provas não pesam nas classificações finais dos alunos: results do not enter the pupil's record and are returned to the school in aggregate form for diagnostic purposes. The Ministério da Educação's stated objective is to track Portuguese pupil performance across the basic-education cycle at three checkpoint years (4, 6 and 9) and to surface curriculum gaps and learning-loss patterns at the agrupamento level — including a comparative read against the OECD PISA cycle in 9th-grade Matemática and Português.

The Wider Education File

The ModA cycle opens against a politically active education backdrop. The Ministério da Educação confirmed an 'adjustment' to the extra-assistance envelope for disadvantaged students last week, narrowing eligibility on the Vamos Estudar program; a teacher-strike calendar continues to roll through the final term; and the National Exams of the 9th and 12th years — the provas finais de ciclo and the exames nacionais do ensino secundário for the 12th — open in mid-June, with the historic university-entry tape that follows. The Loulé administrative-court ruling we covered yesterday on a teacher-data file at a Quarteira agrupamento is one of several open litigation strands inside the broader policy frame.

What This Means for Expat Parents — The Bottom Line

• If your child is in Grade 4 or Grade 6, ModA testing is happening at school across the next two weeks. The exact day depends on the agrupamento's published calendar — confirm with the diretor de turma. Results do not enter the school record; the pupil cannot 'fail' ModA.
• The digital format requires a school-provided device. Pupils do not bring a personal laptop or tablet; the agrupamento is responsible for the devices, the network and the IAVE login credentials. If the school flags a device shortage, contact the Conselho Geral da Escola.
• The Português (PLNM) variant is the entry track for non-native Portuguese-speaking pupils. Children of expat residents who entered the Portuguese system within the past two academic years are typically routed to the PLNM Português track on ModA — the diretor de turma determines the assignment based on the school's Portuguese-language proficiency screening.
• ModA results feed back to the school in aggregate. Parents do not receive a per-pupil ModA mark; the school receives a class-level diagnostic profile and may incorporate it into the next academic year's Plano de Acompanhamento Pedagógico Individual for pupils flagged for support.

The next ModA milestone is the Grade-6 Inglês paper on Friday 29 May; the IAVE publishes the consolidated national tape for the 2026 ModA cycle in early autumn.