Portugal's 2026 Digital Correction Rollout for National Exams — A Cautionary Case

In 2026 Portugal introduced, for the first time, digital correction of national secondary-school exams, run by the Instituto de Avaliação Educativa, I.P. (IAVE) under the Ministry of Education. Students still write answers by hand; papers are then digitised and split by question, so that different teachers grade isolated, anonymised items rather than whole scripts, with multiple-choice sections corrected automatically.

Covering more than 81,000 students in the 12th-grade exam cycle, teacher-graders reported systemic login failures to the platform, missing continuation sheets that left answers unreadable, previously graded exams disappearing from accounts or arriving duplicated, and mismatched subject assignments — including Geography teachers assigned to mark French exams. The teachers' union FNE and the watchdog group Missão Escola Pública publicly criticised the process's opacity, warning that fragmenting scripts into isolated questions strips away the context a grader needs and threatening a formal complaint over lack of transparency on who accesses student papers.

The underlying digitisation programme has cost more than €7 million over three years; despite that investment, the 2026 cycle needed an extended submission deadline for classifiers. It is included here as a cautionary case: a national-scale rollout of algorithmic/administrative correction infrastructure that outpaced the safeguards, testing and teacher-support needed to run it reliably.

Read the full analysis: https://tek.sapo.pt/noticias/computadores/artigos/exames-nacionais-arrancam-hoje-com-correcao-digital-pela-primeira-vez-o-novo-modelo-ja-gerou-polemica-entre-professores-e-sindicatos/