Teachers Lodge a Criminal Complaint Over Portugal's Botched Digital Exam Grading as the PS Demands a Parliamentary Inquiry

Portugal's troubled switch to digital exam marking has moved from a technical headache into a full-blown political and legal fight. Fenprof (Federação Nacional dos Professores, the National Federation of Teachers), the country's largest teaching union, announced over the weekend that it will file a formal complaint with the Procuradoria-Geral da República (Attorney General's Office), asking prosecutors to open an inquiry into "the reliability, security and credibility of the platform and the procedures adopted" to grade this year's national secondary-school exams.

The complaint, which the union says it will lodge this week, follows what teachers describe as a chaotic first attempt at grading exams on a centralised electronic platform after answer papers were scanned — a process that in previous years was done entirely on paper. Fenprof points to "numerous indications about the lack of reliability of the platform," citing delays in getting answer sheets to markers, digitisation errors in the scanned scripts, technical failures on the distribution and grading system, and a sudden weekend dump of new scripts to grade just as the deadline loomed.

The mess has already forced the Ministério da Educação, Ciência e Inovação (Ministry of Education, Science and Innovation) to push the marking deadline back to Tuesday. That is the same platform whose stumbles earlier this month delayed results for some 300,000 students, throwing university-application timetables into doubt.

Fenprof reserved particular scorn for the government's offer to pay markers overtime for the extra weekend work, calling the announcement a source of "bewilderment" and saying it looked "like a prize" rather than a fix for the underlying problems of workload and poor organisation. A separate union, the FNE (Federação Nacional da Educação, National Education Federation), took a different tack, reminding the government that paying overtime to classifiers is a legal obligation, not a favour.

The opposition has smelled blood. José Luís Carneiro, secretary-general of the PS (Partido Socialista, Socialist Party), demanded explanations directly from Prime Minister Luís Montenegro over what he called a crisis of confidence in the exams, and pointedly refused to rule out a parliamentary committee of inquiry (comissão parlamentar de inquérito) into how the digital rollout was handled. The left-wing party Livre went further, accusing the Education Minister of being "a denier of the exam chaos."

For families, the stakes are concrete. National exam grades feed directly into secondary-school completion and the national competition for university places, and every extra day of delay compresses an already tight admissions calendar. The government insists the situation is under control and that final grades will be published once marking closes, but with a criminal complaint now heading to prosecutors and an inquiry threat hanging over Parliament, the digital-grading experiment has become one of the defining political stories of the Portuguese summer — and a cautionary tale about rolling out untested state IT systems on a national deadline.