Sixty-Nine Schools Filed Exam Re-Mark Requests After the Deadline, and the Inspectorate Blames Procedure Rather Than Intent

The Inspectorate-General of Education and Science has finished the urgent inquiry the Education Ministry ordered into this year's national secondary-school exams, and the report released on Friday 28 August puts numbers on a summer of administrative chaos: 69 public and private schools sent re-mark requests to the National Exam Jury after the deadline, and 29 schools were late handing over the exam papers themselves.

The inspectors did not find a scandal. What they found was a system that dropped things. The occurrences, the report says, resulted mainly from "procedural lapses, verification failures and operational errors associated with the processes of organising, checking and dispatching exam documentation". Crucially, the IGEC states that "no elements were identified capable of sustaining the existence of deliberate acts" that compromised the integrity or confidentiality of the papers.

What went wrong, in order

Two separate failures sit inside the same inquiry. The first is that completed exam scripts were sent to the Imprensa Nacional Casa da Moeda, which handles scanning, after they had already been formally collected and handed over by the security forces. The Ministry says this disturbed the digitisation process, the electronic marking and the external assessment that follows from both.

The second is the one that reached families. Re-mark requests from the first phase were forwarded to the National Exam Jury late, in some cases after grade lists had already been posted. That, in the Ministry's own words, "affected students and constrained them in the deadlines within which they carried out their higher-education access process, generating public alarm and calling into question the credibility of the external assessment system".

The volume behind those late files was not small. The National Exam Jury's own account of the first phase counts 21,021 re-mark requests and a further 2,957 requests to correct mark allocations. That figure was already a record when it emerged in early August, and it was itself the product of a more than threefold jump on the previous year in Portugal's first fully digital marking season.

What the inspectors want changed

The IGEC has recommended complementary inquiry proceedings in some individual cases, so the file is not entirely closed. Beyond that, its recommendations split three ways. Schools are asked to reinforce internal control over everything connected to running the exams. The National Exam Jury is asked to improve the platforms currently in use, to train the school staff who have to operate them, and to coordinate more closely with the inspectorate during the exam period. And the participants in the process, at every level, are to receive formal training.

The context matters. This was the first year Portuguese national exams were marked digitally, and the technical failures were serious enough to push grade publication back by several days. The Ministry held the higher-education application calendar anyway, and ordered this inquiry in the middle of the row that followed. First-round university results came out on 23 August; the placement figures are already published. Second-phase re-mark results are due on 14 September.

What This Means for Expats

• If your child sat exams this year: the inquiry found no evidence that any paper was tampered with. If a re-mark request went in late, the fault sits with the school's or the Jury's handling, not with the candidate.
• Second phase is still running: results of second-phase re-appraisals land on 14 September. Do not assume a school will chase a deadline for you; ask for written confirmation that a request was submitted and when.
• Keep your own paper trail: the single clearest lesson of the report is that documentation moved late between institutions. Date-stamped copies of anything you file with a school are worth keeping.
• For next year: digital marking is not being reversed, so the platforms and the training around them are what change. Expect tighter school-level procedures rather than a return to paper.

The inspectorate's conclusion is the mildest one available: not malice, but a process that was not ready for the year it was asked to handle. Whether the recommended platform work and training arrive before the 2027 exam season is the test that follows.