Matemática A national exam (635): what comes up, the format and how to prepare

Status at 5 October 2026: the 2027 Informação-Prova (the official exam specification) and the 2027 exam calendar have not been published yet. This guide describes the 2026 exam, the most recent official reference, and will be updated when the 2027 documents come out.

What exam 635 is

The national final exam (Exame Nacional) in Matemática A, Portugal's main secondary-school maths course, has the code 635 and is sat in 12.º ano (Year 12). It is written by EduQA, I. P., the institute that succeeded IAVE, and marked anonymously, outside the student's school, under the responsibility of the Júri Nacional de Exames (the national exams board).

For many students on the Ciências e Tecnologias (sciences) and Ciências Socioeconómicas (economics) tracks it is a decisive exam: it counts towards the final grade for the subject and can be required as an entrance exam (prova de ingresso) for higher education. Each institution sets the entrance exams for each of its degrees, and the DGES (the directorate-general for higher education) publishes them.

What the exam looks like

Questions can be built around texts, tables, figures and graphs, and a single answer may draw on more than one topic at once. That is why studying topics in isolated compartments is usually not enough.

For the 2025/2026 exams, the general exam specification set a rule that, within one paper, the highest-scoring question cannot be worth more than twice the lowest-scoring one. In practice no single problem decides the grade: every question counts, but none counts too much.

What topics come up

In 2026 the exam was based on the Aprendizagens Essenciais (AE, the official "essential learning" syllabus) for Matemática A in Years 10, 11 and 12. Because two syllabuses were in force side by side, the 2018 AE and the new AE approved in 2023, the exam mainly assessed what the two have in common:

• Geometry
• Functions
• Statistics
• Probability
• Combinatorics
• Sequences
• Complex numbers

For content found in only one of the two syllabuses, the paper included three pairs of questions: in each pair, the student answered just one. On the 2023 AE side these could include, for example, mathematical models for elections, fair division and finance, synthetic geometry, the sum of a geometric progression, the normal distribution and the numerical solution of equations. As an exception, the three optional Year 12 topics (statistical inference, antiderivatives and integrals, matrices) were not assessed in 2026.

And in 2027?

According to the DGE (the directorate-general for education), the new maths AE apply to Year 10 from 2024/2025, to Year 11 from 2025/2026 and to Year 12 from 2026/2027. Students in Year 12 in 2026/2027 are therefore the first full cohort to have studied all three years under the new AE. How the 2027 exam will handle this transition will only be known from its Informação-Prova. The 2026 one was published in November 2025.

How much it counts in the grade

On the general academic (científico-humanísticos) courses, the final subject grade (CFD) of a student who sits the exam as an internal candidate is calculated as follows, on Portugal's 0 to 20 scale:

CFD = (7.5 × CIF + 2.5 × CE) ÷ 10, that is, 75% of the internal school grade (CIF) and 25% of the exam grade (CE), rounded to the nearest whole number.

An illustrative example: a student with an internal grade of 15 and 124 points in the exam. For the CFD, 124 points are worth 12 on the 0 to 20 scale, and the sum is (7.5 × 15 + 2.5 × 12) ÷ 10 = 14.25, so 14.

Matemática A is not necessarily one of a student's exams: to finish secondary school, students sit exams in Portuguese and in two subjects from their specific training, with several possible combinations. But anyone who needs Matemática A as an entrance exam has to sit it regardless.

Matemática A as a university entrance exam

As an entrance exam, the result counts in exact points, without rounding: 124 points stay 124 points, not 12 out of 20. Institutions set a minimum score for their entrance exams, which is always at least 95 points out of 200, and entrance exams count for at least 45% of the application grade (nota de candidatura). A good Matemática A result therefore weighs far more in university entry than in the secondary-school average.

An exam taken in the second phase to improve a first-phase entrance exam only counts as an entrance exam from the second phase of the national application round onwards. It is worth planning this in advance.

Phases and calendar

Exams must be taken in the first phase, after registration. The second phase serves, among other cases, students who did not pass in the first phase, those improving their grade, and those improving entrance exams taken in the first phase of the same year. In 2026 the first phase ran from 16 to 26 June and the second from 16 to 22 July. The 2027 dates will be set by an official order (despacho) that has not yet been published.

How to prepare, in practice

1. Read the year's Informação-Prova as soon as it is published: it says what comes up, how long the exam lasts and what equipment is allowed.
2. Work through past papers with the marking criteria beside you. The criteria show exactly what earns marks in an answer, including the intermediate steps.
3. Practise with the graphing calculator in exam mode before exam day. It is compulsory and cannot have CAS.
4. Start with the common topics (functions, probability and combinatorics, sequences, complex numbers, geometry), which make up most of the paper.
5. Sit at least two full timed papers (150 minutes) in the final weeks, to practise managing the time.
6. Review the mistakes, not just the marks: most lost points repeat from one paper to the next.