Prime Minister Luís Montenegro has thrown his support behind two different ministers as controversies over high school exam marking delays and allegations of favouritism swirl around the government, Público reports. He entered Thursday’s state of the nation debate amid calls for Education Minister Fernando Alexandre to resign over problems with the new digitalised marking system and Home Affairs Minister Luís Neves under fire for work carried out by a friend on his home in the Alentejo. Montenegro said he still had full confidence in both while denying the exam problems were “chaos” but admitting “not everything went well”. “Never has the process been so transparent”, nor has “rigor been so assured”, he said, insisting the digitalisation would “bring improvements”. The Socialist Party (PS) and Left Bloc (BE) led criticisms, calling on the minister to resign, while the governing Social Democratic Party (PSD) and CDS backed him again, accusing the opposition of blowing the issue out of proportion.
Countless reports of unusual problems have been coming from students, teachers and officials, Expresso reports. That’s in addition to the widespread delays in getting their marks, which could affect university applications for some or at least impact whether or how they choose to study to sit an exam again. Several students reported exam marks wildly below what they could have expected and one school official said a student received an evaluation for a test they didn’t even sit. There’s also a likely error on the physics and chemistry A exam. There have been warnings of a possible record number of students requesting their exams to be remarked.
The minister fronted the media on Monday to apologise again, admitting not everything went well but insisting practically all the problems were solved, Público reports. Alexandre said the second phase of exams would go ahead as planned from Tuesday but created a new special period for September, with exact details still to be confirmed. The handling has left the school community with serious doubts.
National Association of Public School Principals president Filinto Lima said the minister was trying to “put out fires” and “minimise the damage”, describing the decision to go ahead with the normal schedule as “political” and “risky”. He said the jump from processing 20,000 philosophy exams under the digital system last year to 300,000 across all disciplines this year was “enormous” and should have been done more gradually. FENPROF teachers union secretary-general Francisco Gonçalves accused Alexandre of trying to make it seem as if this year’s exam process had been “almost normal” when it was unlike anything that had come before. He highlighted pressure and extra hours for markers, some of whom got the exams at the very last minute, errors on the marking platform and students getting back exams that weren’t theirs. He said he didn’t know a single marker who hadn’t received a blank or obviously incomplete test to mark. The Public School Mission (MSP) called on Monday for the Portuguese Bar Association to weigh in on whether students’ constitutional rights to equality and other principles had been breached.
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