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Year 11 students who take national exams at the end of this academic year will follow the new model for completing secondary school and accessing higher education. The changes were published this Friday in Diário da República and come into force tomorrow.
Classes start next week, between September 12th and 15th. The first phase of Secondary exams is scheduled between June 14th and 28th, 2024.
The new regime will be applied in a phased manner, starting to be applied to students in the 11th and those entering the 10th this year. Those in the 12th will take tests according to the exceptional model, applied since 2020 following the pandemic, which allowed students to take only the exams they wanted to use as entrance tests for Higher Education, not counting the tests towards the average end of secondary school.
One of the changes, announced in February and confirmed today in the published ordinance, is that the exams will count 25% towards the final average of the subject, minus 5 percentage points. Another change is that all students will have to take three exams: Portuguese (which is again mandatory) and two more chosen depending on the desired path and course.
The final secondary school average also undergoes changes. The subjects all had the same weight and the weighting will now be different depending on whether they are annual, biennial or triennial. The main objective of this change is to counter the phenomenon of grade inflation.
A report released by the General Directorate of Education and Science Statistics (DGEEC), in January, remember, revealed that it is in the annual optional subjects in the 12th year, not subject to a national exam, as well as Physical Education that are assigned, especially by schools, an excessive number of 19's and 20's that increased the students' final average.
"The universe of private schools is four times smaller but the number of schools with deviant behavior is ten times greater. It's a problem of a subsector", highlighted the Minister of Education, João Costa, when presenting the news on the Infoescolas portal, in May , when he announced that the Government will review the sanctioning regime applied to private colleges and professional schools because of grade inflation.
The preamble of the ordinance states that the changes aim to "ensure mechanisms that allow the reliability and equity of the system to be assessed".