GCSE maths revision guides pulped after investigation finds them 'littered' with mistakes

Guidebooks published for five exam board curricula found books written for Welsh board WJEC to contain 90 mistakes out of 1,496 questions printed

More than 1,000 copies of two revision guides from one top publisher were destroyed and refunds offered (Getty)

A series of official maths revision guidebooks written to help GCSE students have been withdrawn after they were found to be littered with mistakes.

A number of leading publishers have been forced to apologise after a team of experts from Cardiff University’s School of Mathematics found around three in every 50 questions printed in the books were incorrect or misleading.

Errors included incorrect answers to multiplication questions, incorrect symbols used and a missing bracket that made a calculation incorrect.

Mastering Mathematics from Hodder Education, which was aimed at teenagers studying maths on the Welsh GCSE exam board WJEC, contained the worst errors, The Times reported.

Hodder Education said it was reprinting the edition and asked for the incorrect copies to be pulped.

The WJEC exam board said it had not endorsed the book.

Revision guides written for four other UK exams boards, AQA, Pearson/Edexcel, SQA and OCR, were also found to have numerous mistakes, some of which had been officially endorsed by the boards.

AQA responded that the book relating to its qualification was not approved by the board, which had no involvement in its production.

Defending the errors, Hodder Education’s managing director Lis Tribe said: “We are human. We do our best. We have made a mistake.

She told the BBC: ”Where our process fell down, which is a real concern to me and to my team, is that there wasn't the final quality check that should have taken place. We simply missed a stage because of the pressure of getting the book out on time.

Matthew Lettington, who led the research with Cardiff University, said: “That level of mistakes is unacceptable. Some of the errors we found very confusing ourselves and most students would find these particular errors highly confusing whatever their ability.”

Among other errors were eight errors in 563 questions in the Revise Edexcel GCSE (9-1) maths revision workbook, published by Pearson.

Pearson said that the first printing of the book contained a small number of errors, which have been corrected. The original containing the mistakes has been recalled and destroyed.

“Errors are not acceptable in our books and we work hard and have procedures in place to produce books that are as error-free as possible, and we act quickly to correct them,” a spokesman said.