Politics 6 August 2026

Sat a second-phase exam in Portugal? Results land on Friday, and not everyone trusts them

The Education Ministry has confirmed second-phase national exam grades and first-phase re-marks will be published on 7 August. The Socialists call the handling a hit-and-run, after EduQA admitted an export error affecting 1,400 papers.

Friday 7 August is the date. Second-phase national exam grades go up, and so do the results of re-marking requests from the first phase. The Education Ministry has confirmed the deadline holds. That confirmation is exactly what worries the people who have been following this all summer.

Why anyone doubts the numbers

Because it already went wrong once. First-phase grades were due on 14 July, slipped to the 17th, and still landed with problems. EduQA — the institute that took over external assessment from IAVE this year — admitted a computing export error in the first batch of grades, a fault it accepts affected roughly 1,400 papers carrying a suspension code.

More corrections followed. On 4 August, EduQA reversed itself and agreed to accept two different answers as correct on one item in the second-phase Physics and Chemistry A paper. The marking platform had also warned examiners that error-correction work was under way across a group of items, without saying how many or in which subjects.

The opposition’s line

Porfírio Silva, deputy leader of the Socialist parliamentary group, described minister Fernando Alexandre’s handling of the exams as a hit-and-run. His specific fear is that meeting Friday’s deadline will mean publishing grades without reliability guarantees all over again.

The row has already produced an emergency standing-committee session and continues to drive the parliamentary fight over the switch to electronic marking.

If this affects you

Grades are posted at the school where you sat the paper and appear in the student area online. University applicants then face the tight timetable of the second round of higher education admissions, which runs immediately after results. Official dates for every paper and posting are published in the exams calendar.

By Tomás Vasconcelos

Image: JnpoJuwan / Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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