Exam board makes yet another blunder by switching numbers of MPs on politics paper

The exam board Edexcel notched up the latest in a long list of blunders yesterday when a printing error included the wrong numbers of MPs in a politics paper.

Officials spotted the error – which saw the number of MPs elected in 1997 and 2001 reversed – and alerted the printers but the mistake was not corrected in papers sent up to 600 schools.

Edexcel faxed all of the schools yesterday morning, but admitted that some may have not learned of the mistake before students sat the AS-level government and politics exam later in the day.

Edexcel has been threatened with losing its contract because of a series of blunders, including putting an unanswerable question in a maths paper and omitting pages of a communications test.

The board said it would work out how many students had been affected by the latest mistake today and would take that into account in marking.

Frank Wingate, an Edexcel spokesman, said: "As soon as we found out about that problem this morning, we faxed an erratum to all the centres and it's possible that some of them didn't get it in time.

"We are waiting to see the full effect. We would stress that we will make sure that no students will be badly affected or disadvantaged by that. We have to take responsibility for the error. We will be dealing with probably 10 million marks this summer and we are dealing with over a thousand papers. But all the errors that are made we regret very much and they hurt us."

Edexcel was involved in controversy earlier this month when it was forced to hire trainee teachers to mark GCSE scripts because of a shortage of markers.