Pressure is growing on Portugal’s education minister to resign amid student and teacher protests over his handling of this year’s national school exams.
Fernando Alexandre is accused of failing to take responsibility for what critics say is an unprecedented and chaotic school exam season affecting children aged 14 to 18, prompting student protesters to call for him “to be flunked”.
At the centre of the controversy, which has plunged the Portuguese education sector into its worst crisis in decades, is Alexandre’s push to fully digitise the process for marking exams.
The centre-right government said the shift was necessary to modernise Portugal’s public administration and make school evaluations “more rigorous and objective” for the more than 260,000 students taking exams in primary and secondary schools.
But many parents, teachers and students have graded the change a failure and some people are contemplating pursuing legal action against the state. About 19,000 people have signed a petition calling for the annulment of all of this year’s results.
The principal of one of the largest school groups in Portugal, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said: “I struggle to trust in the process after everything that happened.”
In the weekly newspaper Expresso, the journalist and political commenter Daniel Oliveira decried the “inexplicable chaos” of the process, attacked Alexandre’s “unspeakable display of incompetence”, and said the credibility of the entire examination system had been “mortally wounded”.
It didn’t take long for the cracks to show in the new system, in which digitised, anonymous questions were distributed randomly to teachers and the grading professors’ remit was changed.
From the start of the exam season in mid-June, schools reported errors in the allocation of papers, with retired teachers and at least one dead teacher being called to mark them. Some educators were told to mark subjects out of their areas of expertise.
While grading the exams, several teachers reported difficulty accessing the marking platform, missing continuation pages, incomplete student answers, illegible scanned images and students’ answers disappearing from the online system.
André Azinheira, 32, a secondary school maths teacher, said he had received clear instructions to grade answers despite uncertainty over whether he was assessing a student’s full submission or whether pages were missing.
He said: “I knew someone could be wrong, but I had no way of knowing if pages were indeed missing, so I had to do my part. I may have hurt students or not, I have no idea. But I predicted there would be several errors in the grades.”
The Guardian heard of other cases in which teachers expressed similar dilemmas.
Reacting to growing unease from schools and students, Alexandre blamed staff for failing to “remove staples from the tests”, supposedly complicating the digitisation process. He dismissed teachers’ complaints about errors in the digital marking platform as insignificant or “false”.
After the results were released, three days late in mid-July, thousands of students complained about extreme discrepancies between their predicted grades and the posted exam grades, with some realising their grades were still missing.
Upon requesting access to a copy of the exam, several students reported finding missing pages, unknown handwriting and answers due to switched tests, and, in some cases, lost exams. Some students with special educational needs have complained that during the digitisation of the tests, the tags identifying those additional needs were left out, potentially affecting the grading.
An education watchdog later said that 26,000 exams had been affected by software or “parameterisation” errors, and that more than 18,000 grades were being changed.
Requests for re-evaluation of national high school exams have already exceeded 20,000, three times more than last year, according to data revealed by the minister of education this week. Every re-evaluation process has a cost of €25 (£21) a test, and the payment has to be made by the student.
After witnessing his friends and colleagues’ stress over switched and missing papers and exam grades, Raul Noetzold, 18, created a students’ movement called Chumbado.pt to call for Alexandre’s resignation. Last Friday, hundreds of students, parents, teachers and members of several opposition parties protested outside the education ministry.
Luciana Almeida, 18, would have attended the protest but she lives and studies in Penafiel, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Lisbon. Almeida said she had not received a grade for the Portuguese exam she took in June. After her classmates received theirs, she discovered her paper had got lost in a pile of undigitised exams and she had been forced to repeat the test.
“I worked hard and I feel cheated because they lost my test,” said Almeida. “I feel at a disadvantage compared with others. And it will be hard for me to trust the new results … These college applications won’t be fair. It’s our future that’s at stake and the ministry of education is ruining it.”
Last week, an embattled Alexandre announced that students affected by software errors would not be awarded less than the minimum pass mark. But some teachers are not happy about that decision, saying in some cases it will unfairly affect students’ college applications.
And many parents remain furious. Rita Reino, 53, president of the parents’ association of Camões high school in Lisbon, said: “At this stage there is no fair solution. The state has violated the principles of equality and fairness. We want to hold the state accountable; we want to sue the state.”
The fiasco is proving politically damaging for the government, although the prime minister, Luís Montenegro, has so far resisted calls to fire Alexandre. A recent survey found that seven out of 10 Portuguese are deeply unhappy with the government and cite the exam debacle as one of the leading causes of dissatisfaction.
In a statement, the education ministry acknowledged that the “disruptions in implementation” had caused “instability in the education system and anxiety among students and families”, which it said it regretted.
It added: “Despite the constraints of the first phase, the process is now proceeding in the second phase without significant problems, and on the third day of grading more than 65% of the tests had already been graded.”
Asked about the calls for Alexandre to resign, the ministry said: “Calls for resignation are part of the public, political and democratic debate. However, given the situation, the priority of the ministry of education was to identify the problems, correct them quickly, and ensure that no student is harmed in their school career or access to higher education.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
