Portugal's Mathematicians Want the National Tests to Count Again, After PISA Put Fifteen-Year-Olds Below Their 2003 Score

Portugal's mathematicians want the country's national school assessments to carry real weight in a pupil's final grade again, and they want the credit hours that paid for remedial support put back into schools.

The Sociedade Portuguesa de Matemática set out those proposals on Sunday in a formal opinion on the latest PISA results, the OECD's international study of 15-year-olds, published the previous Tuesday. Portuguese pupils fell again in mathematics, reading and science. In mathematics the score was 460 points, a drop of 12, and below the 466 recorded in 2003.

The OECD's own table confirms the figures. Table I.1 of PISA 2025 Results (Volume I) puts Portugal at 460 in mathematics, 12 points below 2022 and three points below the OECD average of 463, alongside 482 in science and 462 in reading. On the OECD's own comparison, Portugal sits level with the average in science and a point above it in reading, so mathematics is the one subject where the country now sits below the OECD line. Reading fell further over the three years, by 15 points.

The society's reading of that number is stark. Portugal, it says, has fallen back to a level it had already passed more than two decades ago, with "a 15-year-old in 2025 showing on average a performance equivalent to a pupil of just over 13 in 2018".

Make the tests count

The central proposal concerns the ModA, the national digital assessments used to monitor learning. The society wants them turned "into consequential tests, with real weight in pupils' final classification", on the model of the end-of-cycle final examinations that operated between 2012 and 2015.

Alongside that it asks for the reactivation of structured support for struggling pupils, with credit hours restored to schools, and it explains the reasoning in terms of the PISA data itself: in a system where more than a third of 15-year-olds are low performers, and where socioeconomic inequality is worth 99 points of difference in mathematics performance, structured support "is an obligation".

The third request is the return of textbook certification, described as a minimum guarantee of quality and of alignment with the curriculum.

A list of causes, and a case for measurement

The opinion sets out what the society believes went wrong. It points to the abolition of the final examinations in the fourth and sixth years of schooling; to radical curriculum changes that it says downgraded knowledge in favour of loosely defined competences; to the interruption of an effective system for tracking results and of the credit hours given to schools; and to the suspension of textbook assessment partway through evaluation cycles.

Against that background it asks for a "deep revision" of the law, to "restore the primacy of disciplinary knowledge, to reinstate objective and verifiable assessment criteria", and to free teachers from the administrative load that takes time away from teaching.

The society is direct about the objection it expects. Assessing what is measurable "is not a step backwards", it argues; it is "a condition of rigour, of confidence and of transparency in the system".

Ten years of warnings

The opinion stresses that this is not a reaction to one bad year. It traces a sustained improvement in mathematics between 2000 and 2015, followed by consecutive declines, and says the latest figures represent historic lows for Portugal. The society says it has flagged the same trajectory at every assessment point over the past decade, with the data pointing each time to "a progressive and accelerating degradation of learning in mathematics".

Its closing argument is about who pays for the drift. An education system that abandons clear and assessable objectives, devalues structured knowledge and removes the mechanisms for monitoring learning, the society writes, does not protect its pupils. It harms them, and it harms the most vulnerable ones most.