Exam board apologises after questions blunder

Britain's largest exam board was forced to apologise yesterday after it issued 40,000 students with a GCSE paper containing questions that they could not answer.

In the second exam error in as many days, the AQA board admitted including questions in an English literature paper about poems that were not on the syllabus. The blunder emerged only 24 hours after the troubled Edexcel board issued the first apology of the exam season. It admitted that AS-level politics papers contained a potentially misleading printing error.

The exam watchdog, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, has launched separate inquiries into how both incidents went undetected.

Meanwhile, headteachers called for an urgent review of the exam system, arguing that the sheer volume of tests taken was responsible for the increasingly frequent errors.

The AQA board said it apologised "unreservedly" for the error, which affected GCSE candidates who had studied the poets Robert Frost and R S Thomas for the section on 20th-century poets, worth one-third of the marks.

Students of this option were required to answer one of two poetry questions but errors made it impossible for some candidates to answer either. The first question asked candidates to consider Robert Frost's poem "Unharvested". The poem was not on the syllabus or in the anthologies that students take into the exam.

A Devon school complained to the board when pupils became distraught during the exam after failing to find the poem in their set texts.

The second question asked them to compare poems about childhood by each author but schools said the anthology did not include poems on childhood by each poet.

George Turnbull, a spokesman for AQA, said the board was "hugely embarrassed" by the mistake and would ensure no student was disadvantaged by the "human error". It is not known how many students will have been affected but the board has already had complaints from 25 schools.

Edexcel's latest mistake involved data for a question on an AS-level Government and Politics paper, sat by students at 600 schools and colleges on Tuesday, which transposed election result figures for 1997 and 2001. The error was spotted by an Edexcel proofreader last month and a corrected exam was sent to the printers, but somehow the flawed sheet was reprinted as well. The printers have apologised for the error, the board said.

David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said: "How many more times do we have to tolerate this level of incompetence by exam boards?"