Portugal is spending €500,000 to keep its exam system upright until 2027
Education minister Fernando Alexandre has let EduQA spend up to €500,000 propping up national exam marking. The system meant to actually fix it, GAEBS, does not arrive until 2027.
Portugal’s education minister has authorised EduQA to spend up to €500,000 on emergency technology support to keep national exam marking upright. This is not planned investment — it is an expensive sticking plaster, bought halfway through the bleeding.
The money lets the institute contract services, buy equipment and bring in specialist consultants where properly justified. Translation: to pay someone to stand up, right now, the system that was supposed to be standing since early June.
So what is actually going wrong with the exam platform?
Everything a marking platform cannot afford to get wrong. The system sat “under maintenance” from at least late Sunday afternoon until 15:25 on Monday, with teachers losing hours from a deadline that does not stretch. Along the way the reports have piled up: wrong summonses, teachers called to mark subjects they don’t teach, exams vanishing from the system, unreadable scans, answers cut off mid-sentence and pages swapped between different papers.
Fernando Alexandre told Lusa a security weakness had been found and since fixed. Teachers are still reporting errors, and the underlying problems still have no answer.
And when does someone properly fix this?
Here is the part nobody at the ministry wants to underline: 2027. The permanent system, GAEBS, is meant to pull registrations, exam organisation, marking, results publication and school-record certification into one place. It is due to go live in 2027 — meaning the structural fix does not arrive in time to rescue 2026. This year runs on €500,000 and goodwill.
The most uncomfortable detail is that none of this was unforeseeable. The failures were flagged roughly a year ago in a pilot that tested the same digital marking model with the 2025 Philosophy exam. They were read, filed, and the model went ahead anyway.
In parliament this stopped being an IT story and became a political one: the Socialists are pushing for a parliamentary inquiry, and the cost to students is showing up in the data — remarking is raising grades in 76% of cases. The official exam calendar still lives on the IAVE website, which is where families end up knocking when something doesn’t add up.
Half a million euros to plug a hole everyone knew was there. That’s steep — and it’s only the price of the easy part.
Image: António Amen / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
