The company responsible for losing the records of more than three million learner drivers was yesterday at the centre of a new controversy after it took responsibility for scoring errors in a new university entrance exam.

Pearson Vue, the largest testing company and education publisher, administers the UKCAT Clinical Aptitude Test, taken every year by thousands of applicants to medical and dentistry schools.

It admitted that an error by its employees in tabulating the scores in the autumn tests had invalidated the results of a section that was worth a quarter of the final marks.

As a result, the UKCAT consortium of 23 medical and dentistry schools, which hired Pearson to administer the tests, had to scrap the marks for that part of the test for all students. This meant that students received scores for their tests that were different from those that were sent to the universities to which they were applying.

In an explanatory letter to students, the consortium admitted that it had concerns about the Abstract Reasoning test. “To ensure absolute fairness to all candidates, medical and dental schools have been informed and therefore have not and will not take into consideration this component of the UKCAT results for selection for 2008 entry,” it said.

Although Pearson informed the consortium of the error at the end of October, students were not informed until Monday night, shortly after news of Pearson’s lost driving records emerged.

Nicola Fardell, 28, an osteopath from Brighton who applied to study medicine at Oxford, said that she was furious because she had scored 100 per cent in the part of the test that was scrapped. She said: “I have dyslexia, which means I find some parts of the test, such as verbal reasoning, quite hard under exam conditions.

“As I had got an exceptional result in the abstract reasoning part I was told that I had a good chance of getting an interview at Oxford, so I applied there.” However, she did not realise that Oxford had not been sent her score for the abstract reasoning section and she was declined a place.

Ian Noble, chairman of the medical student committee of the British Medical Association and a student at Sheffield University, said: “Tests at any level in medicine should be reliable and valid and that’s the only way you can be sure of getting the best doctors for the future.”

Pearson Vue said that it regretted the problems. “This inconsistency was picked up by Pearson Vue through quality assurance before the erroneous score distorted the application process, so none of the inconsistent results was used in the application process, which the UKCAT consortium determined was the fairest solution to all candidates.”

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