Organize the management, requirements and accountability of teaching assignments

Each teacher could run classes almost as he/she wanted, without clear guidelines and accountability, pursueing a routine of repeating what he/she had been doing for many years. The increased organization, the raising of the level of school curricula and the accountability of teaching led to less prepared teachers who also had external jobs to voluntarily leave IST since "it was too much work", leaving room to hire new teaching staff, many recruited as Undergraduate Teaching Assistants from the best students in Mathematics courses. An intensive program of recruiting new talent and attracting foreign PhDs was adopted.

The work required from students in courses and exams was structured and made predictable. This included drastically reducing the number of exam opportunities that had been in effect since the 1974 "April 25 Revolution", which were a huge waste of time and effort for teachers and students: each student had 6 opportunities to take written exams in each semester course; in 1983/84, they were reduced to 3 in the courses Mathematical Analysis III and IV, and in the next year this propagated to the other courses offered by the IST Mathematics Department. Later on the exam opportunities in each course were reduced to 2 per semester.

The Coordination of teaching assignments for the courses that were of the responsibility of the Algebra and Analysis Section of the IST Mathematics Department was assured in the decade 1983-93 by Luis Magalhães. When in 1993 he moved to Chair of the IST Mathematics Department, that Coordination was left to João Palhoto Matos (1994-95), followed by Carlos Rocha (1996-June 1997), Francisco Teixeira (July 1997-98), Pedro Gonçalves Henriques (1999-2010 and 2015-22), Pedro Resende (2011-14), Luís Barreira (2023-), who pursued the work done in the the decade 1983-93.