Portuguese and Economics Tests This Tuesday, the debut of digital correction — which, in addition to smart watches, glasses with response visualization or small disguised headphones, is also a concern.
The national secondary education exams start this Tuesday with almost half of the 166 thousand registered students taking the exam Portuguese testwhich continues to be made on paper, but will be corrected, for the first time, in digital format.
At 9:30 am, more than 81 thousand students started (or at least should have started) taking the national 12th year Portuguese exam. It is the most popular, as it is the only mandatory to complete secondary education.
Thus begins the 1st phase of the national exams, which continue to have an impact on the completion of secondary education and the grade for access to higher education, with more than 73 thousand boys and almost 93 thousand girls expected over the next ten days of tests.
Two 166,339 registered, 93,596 (56%) said their goal was to apply for higher educationaccording to data from the Ministry of Education.
This Tuesday is also the day of the national exam for students of 11th yearsince at 2:00 p.m. the test begins Economy Afor which just over 17 thousand students are registered.
Paper exams, but digital correction
This year, one of the big news will be the way of evaluating the tests. Contrary to what was predicted with the total digital transition, exams will continue to be carried out on paper, but the tests will be marked in digital format.
Students will continue to write their answers by hand, but instead of traditional exam sheets, the answers will be given on specific sheets that will be digitized so that corrective teachers can correct and evaluate them on the digital platform.
Only the Descriptive Geometry A and Drawing A exams are excluded from this new model.which do not undergo any changes.
Exam dates, grades and application results
The 1st phase of the national exams takes place between the 16th and 26th of June, followed by the 2nd phase, between the 16th and 22nd of July.
The grades for the 1st phase will be announced on July 14th and, a week later, on July 20th, registration will begin for students who wish to continue their studies.
The results of the applications will be announced on August 23rd.
Public higher education institutions made 78,283 places available for the next academic year, 1,465 more than in the current year. 56,790 places are reserved for the General Access Regime, in addition to 21,493 available for Special Regimes and Competitions.
New forms of “copying”
The “revolution” in the format of exams brings new concerns for directors. These are, in addition to the fragility of the digital format, smart watches, feedback-viewing glasses, or small disguised earbudssays Filinto Lima, president of the National Association of Directors of Districts and Public Schools (Andaep), to .
“There are smart watches, glasses where you can visualize the answers, a kind of earring in which they hear the answers, a series of new technologies that schools are not prepared to detect”, says the person in charge.
The person responsible considers that surveillance methods remain out of date in the face of technological developments, which can create illegitimate advantages for students who use these devices without being detected. If fraud is discovered, the person responsible warns: the test will be canceled and the student will be penalized.
Another concern is related to the expanded debut of digital correction. The model was already tested last year in Philosophy, but on a much smaller scale. Now, around 300,000 pieces of evidence will be at stake and millions of pages will be digitized at the Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda.
Some teachers fear that dividing the correction into installments takes away the classifiers’ overview of the test, making fine revisions difficult in cases of grades close to relevant levels. Maria do Carmo Oliveira, from the Association of Portuguese Teachers, admits that the principle may be positive, but fears a drop in ratings.
