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National tests and exams will now be corrected in digital format and, in secondary education, each correcting teacher will now evaluate only one item and not all of the tests, to ensure greater fairness in the assessments.
This is one of the changes in the new external assessment model announced this Thursday by the team led by the Minister of Education, Science and Innovation, Fernando Alexandre, who guaranteed that national secondary school exams will continue to be carried out on paper, but the form of assessment will be different.
"We did not change the rules for national exams because we did not think it was fair to introduce a new disruption", announced the minister, ensuring that the new rules for secondary education will aim to improve and make assessment fairer, since these tests serve as access to Higher Education.
Thus, national exams will continue to be done on paper , but they will then be digitalized and, instead of teachers receiving a package of exams to evaluate, they will do the "evaluation by items and not by tests", reducing the injustice of a student having a more or less demanding evaluator, explained the minister.
There are disciplines that are left out
In the next academic year, these changes in assessment will only be tested in the Philosophy exam, and will be extended to the remaining subjects in the following academic year (2025/2026), said Secretary of State Alexandre Homem Cristo, adding that subjects such as Drawing A will always be left out of this model, since electronic grading is not suitable.
The minister explained that the fact that teachers only evaluate one item will also allow us to "evaluate the evaluation": "If there is an evaluator who has a very different evaluation standard to the others, this allows us to identify that evaluator".
Alexandre Fernandes believes that with this model it will be easier to "identify bias" when it exists and, ultimately, "there may be contact with the teacher to correct the bias".
9th grade exams continue to be worth 30% of the final grade
The ministry team stresses that it is simply "adopting international best practices" that will change the fairness with which students are assessed. There will also be new developments in the 9th grade.
The national tests for completing the Portuguese and Mathematics cycle continue to be worth 30% of the final classification, but the test results will no longer be published, revealed the Secretary of State.
The ministry's idea is to design a test with some repeated items that allow for comparison of tests over the years, explained the secretary of state, highlighting that this is a common practice in several countries and in international assessments, such as PISA.
Students will not have access to the statement
The Secretary of State guaranteed that the fact that the tests are not public will not prevent families from requesting their review, although it is certain that they will never have access to the statement.
"Last year, only 0.15% of students asked to review their exams in the 9th year", he revealed, adding that students will continue to have "every possibility of reviewing".
The 9th grade Portuguese test will be done in digital format, but the Mathematics test will have a hybrid format: It will be digital, with the exception of the exercises that require mathematical writing and which will be done on paper.