The digital grading process for external assessment tests is a highly complex technical and organizational operation, involving thousands of graders, hundreds of thousands of student responses, and a set of demanding procedures designed to ensure fairness among students and the validity of the results.
The process that JNE/EduQA developed this academic year, for the first time in the Portuguese education system, faced difficulties that are now public knowledge. Even so, teachers, technicians, and collaborators from INCM were mobilized, whose work, along with the efforts of the grading teachers, made the digital grading of external assessment tests possible.
The digital transition in the grading of national exams and final basic education tests involves the digitization of answer sheets, their digital processing, and the availability of the tests for grading. Due to the nature of this operation, technical or organizational difficulties may occur, such as scanning errors, incomplete or illegible images, missing pages or items, and incorrect file association.
In the current academic year, 290,351 tests were administered, corresponding to 2,059,974 digitized items. In exceptional situations, a test sheet may be lost or one or more answer items may be unavailable for reasons not attributable to the student. Although these occurrences are rare, they require specific, uniform, verifiable, and transparent procedures.
The guiding principle should be to ensure that no student is harmed by an administrative, technical, or logistical event beyond their control, while simultaneously preserving the integrity of the assessment, the comparability of results, and the transparency of the procedure adopted.
In light of the above, the JNE/EduQA considers it appropriate to ensure the publication of the national secondary school exam grades today, July 17, 2026, by 7:30 PM, and subsequently define the procedure to be applied to exams with missing items, namely regarding consultation, review, or appeal. In this regard, further guidance will be provided to schools on this matter in due course. These cases will be marked on the grade sheets as "suspended".
Within the scope of the 2026 National Exams, and in order to facilitate access to the exams for students and their guardians, the JNE/EduQA provides the Exam Submission Platform, through which each School Cluster can access the exams of the schools that comprise it.
On the other hand, taking into account the need to prioritize the dissemination of the results of the national secondary school exams, which are crucial for access to higher education and whose first application phase takes place online from July 20th, the JNE/EduQA decided to postpone the posting of the final cycle exam results until the beginning of next week.
We thank you in advance for your continued cooperation, which is essential to ensuring safe and timely access to exams and external assessment results.
The President of the National Examination Board
Publicado em July 17, 2026
