To get to a public college in Portugal, you need to get better marks than the other students applying for the same degree you want. If a degree opens with 80 places in some university, you need to at least be the 80th with the best school results to get in. This fact gives special importance to the national exams since they can represent between 30% to 50% on your final mark.

With coronavirus pandemic and the school year interrupted, the Portuguese government changed the rules of these exams, giving, for example, optional questions in some exams. That lead to rising values on the marks needed to get in some degrees. But how much?

Using the data from the last four years, I’ve calculated the mean for 869 degrees and the standard deviation to check which marks changed the most. I’ve found out that, in 2020, 77% degrees had higher necessary marks to get in than what was considered “normal” in the last four years. For example, Architecture, at Universidade de Lisboa, used to require you to have a mark higher than 11 (on a scale from 0 to 20), and the value used to fluctuate very little. In 2020, the last person to get in had 15.35 as a final result.